![\"\"](\"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/when-the-thrill-is-gone.jpg\" "\\"when-the-thrill-is-gone\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nLeonid McGill makes only his third appearance in Walter Mosley\u2019s new series, but we\u2019ve seen his kind before \u2014 the hard-boiled kind.\u00a0 Short, stocky and deadly, McGill works the New York streets, the same \u201cmean\u201d streets patrolled by Raymond Chandler\u2019s Philip Marlowe and Dashiell Hammett\u2019s Sam Spade.\u00a0 The words McGill uses to describe himself could have come from their lips:\u00a0\u201cPatience is one of my best qualities \u2026. But patience is not my only virtue.\u00a0 I can also take a punch, or a hint, go for years without love or relief, and I can face Death in the eye and hardly flinch.\u00a0 Not only can I stand up under pain, but I can ignore the pain others feel.\u00a0 I always pay my debts but rarely act out of a desire for personal revenge.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0Drinking hard, doing in bad guys and falling for dames, McGill is a tough guy directly descended from Marlowe and Spade.<\/p>\n
And he\u2019s one of the best.\u00a0 He\u2019s not just hard-boiled, he\u2019s hard-core.\u00a0 As someone somewhere said, nobody writes this stuff like Mosley.\u00a0 At the beginning of the book, McGill finds his wife having an affair with his son\u2019s best friend, his son running a scam on the subway system, his mentor dying of cancer \u2014 and no client.\u00a0When two clients appear, he doesn\u2019t want them:\u00a0He doesn\u2019t believe the woman who says her husband is trying to kill her, and he doesn\u2019t want to work for the crime boss anymore.<\/p>\n
In true hard-boiled tradition, however, he can\u2019t turn down the money in the first case, and the favor in the second.\u00a0More complex than they seem, of course, the two cases send him across (and under) the urban landscape looking for some resolution, of the cases and his life.<\/p>\n
Abandoned by a black Marxist father, orphaned by a heart-broken mother, and brought up in the streets, McGill now tries to save the world without losing his soul.\u00a0Once upon a time, he was a \u201cpredator, who \u201c\u2026stalked people\u2019s souls, took from them their most precious possessions, their secrets.\u201d As he\u00a0threads his rehabilitated way through Mosley\u2019s plotline, he provides a unique perspective on reaches of society the reader rarely encounters, from the ridiculously rich husband who builds a bungalow on top of a skyscraper, to the beat-down prostitute he offers to save from her pimp.\u00a0While McGill searches for the woman his client says she is, and the man the crime boss wants, he engages with a wide range of unseen New York: pool with the richest pool hall owner in the city, conversation with the cop who wants to take him down, dinner with a retired assassin and his family, and love with the woman his client said she was.<\/p>\n
All along the way, he drops observations that are part of the reason Mosley is the best African- American novelist writing today:\u00a0 \u201cOne day it came to me that the isolation and alienation of rush hour is like so many marriages I\u2019ve investigated \u2014 a lifetime spent together in the same bed and still managing to keep separate and remote\u201d; and \u201cBlood may be thicker than water, but family has them both beat.\u201d<\/p>\n
As McGill works his way to\u00a0a\u00a0resolution, he encounters a dead body, hired killers, a hot limousine driver, a cult, and a little peace of mind about his father.\u00a0Some of his problems are resolved at the book\u2019s conclusion, and some take a surprising turn.\u00a0Only a couple of things are certain at the end of the book \u2014 he found the killer, and he will be back.<\/p>\n
\u201c<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Bob Moyer has been reading Walter Mosley\u2019s new series again \u2013 with pleasure. By Robert Moyer WHEN THE THRILL IS GONE. By Walter Mosley. Riverhead Books. 368 pages. $26.95 Leonid McGill makes only his third appearance in Walter Mosley\u2019s new series, but we\u2019ve seen his kind before \u2014 the hard-boiled kind.\u00a0 Short, stocky and deadly, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[27,79],"class_list":["post-380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contemporary-literary-fiction","category-mysteries","tag-mystery","tag-walter-mosley"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":382,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380\/revisions\/382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lindabrinson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}