Jillionaire Roger claims to abhor Quiller’s politics, but, he intones, “the betrayal of our civil rights is a crime worse than any he’s being held for.” Quiller is a noted inventor, a “natural-born genius,” and a manifesto-penning icon of white nationalism. A man named Alfred Xavier Quiller has been unduly jailed in a secret cell on Rikers Island. Roger asks Joe to investigate what appears to be a government kidnapping. Roger is the boyfriend of Joe’s feisty grandmother, Brenda, whose parents were sharecroppers. The client is Roger Ferris, an enormously rich old white guy. The narrative begins with Joe King Oliver, a Black ex-cop and private detective in New York, driving uptown to meet a client at a palatial estate overlooking the Hudson River. These words - a cry for equality from a bygone era - are a snug fit for Mosley’s novel, which skitters across the spectrum between orthodox and radical like a polygraph needle wired to a nervy accomplice. It was the catchphrase of the firebrand Louisiana populist Huey Long, who might have challenged Franklin Roosevelt from the left in 1936, were he not assassinated first. The title of Walter Mosley’s provocative new novel, “Every Man a King,” is a motto with a violent history.
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