SOURCE: Lochte, Dick. “Easy's Epiphany.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (2 February 1997): 10.

In the following review, Lochte comments that Gone Fishin' lacks many of the strengths of the previous novels in Mosley's Easy Rawlins series.

One of the unique aspects of Walter Mosley's mystery novels is that they are presented as time-hopping memoirs narrated by their protagonist, a wily and philosophic African American of seventy-something years named Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins. Each book focuses on a different period in Easy's eventful life, but one memory continues to reverberate throughout all of them.

Early in the author's first published novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, Easy recalls his homicidal friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander: “He had killed his stepfather five years earlier and blamed it on another man.” We are further told, in this and in the succeeding Rawlins mysteries, that Easy's involvement in this murder produced such a profound change in...