The Nature of Things

Michael Connelly employs the same writing technique he has used so successfully in his police procedurals, private detective mysteries, and "Lincoln lawyer" stories in his latest book featuring investigative journalist Jack McEvoy. We follow the reporter step by step as he works to cover a complicated story involving the misuse of DNA data and a possible serial killer. McEvoy has investigated and helped to take down a couple of serial killers in the past, so one might say this is his wheelhouse. He has written a couple of popular books about his experiences with those cases, but he's now employed as a reporter for a website called Fair Warning that champions consumer rights so he first approaches his story as it pertains to the violation of consumer rights. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The story begins when McEvoy is visited by two detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department who are investigating the murder of a woman named Tina Portrero. Portrero is someone...

Harry Bosch is less of a jerk in this latest book than he has been in the past. Is it possible that he is finally mellowing as he nears 70? After all, he has been retired from the LAPD now for four years, time to chill out a bit.  Or maybe it is the influence of his latest "partner" Renee Ballard. Ballard isn't really his partner, of course. She is a 30ish detective with LAPD. She works the midnight shift known as the "Late Show" and she has hooked up with Harry before to work cases. He has become something of a mentor for her and she is certainly a worthy successor to his years with the police department. She is every bit as obsessed as he ever was. One of Harry's early mentors has recently died and the opening scene of the book finds him attending the funeral. At the reception later, the widow gives him something that her husband had taken with him when he retired from the department. It is the murder book for an unsolved murder that took place more than t...

If anyone does police procedurals better than Michael Connelly, I don't know who it is. He takes us step by step by step through investigations and describes the actions of the police, warts and all. We see when they step over the line into criminal behavior in order to catch a criminal. In Connelly's world, though, their motives are always righteous. Dark Sacred Night , the title taken from a phrase in the lyrics for "What a Wonderful World," is Connelly's latest effort and it features two of his characters: Renee Ballard and Harry Bosch. Detective Ballard is still working for LAPD on the "late show," the night shift of the department working the streets of Los Angeles. Harry is still working as a reserve officer with the San Fernando Police Department, assigned to working cold cases. It's a cold case that brings the two together. Harry is working on the case of a 15-year-old runaway named Daisy Clayton who was brutally raped and murdered and her bo...

I read the first Harry Bosch mystery, The Black Echo , five years ago, in August 2013 and I was hooked. I came late to my addiction because that book had been published more than twenty years before in 1992, but I've been chasing Harry ever since, usually reading three or four of the books each year.  And now I've finally caught him! Two Kinds of Truth is the most current entry in the series, so now I'll have to wait around until Michael Connelly produces another one.  Harry is well past his time with the LAPD and well into his 60s. He's working now for the police department in the small city of San Fernando, a suburb of Los Angeles, reviewing cold cases. But, one way or another, he keeps getting pulled back to his days with the LAPD. This time an old case of his, one that he had cleared thirty years before, is being reviewed.  The man he arrested for the rape and murder of a young woman was convicted and sent to death row where he has remained for the last thirty year...

Harry Bosch can be a grade A jerk at times and he continues to solidify that reputation in The Wrong Side of Goodbye . In this instance, where he is working as a part-time reserve officer for the police force in the small town of San Fernando, his jerkitude is shown by his refusal to abide by the rules of the department by signing in and out. Apparently, he does it for no better reason than that he doesn't like the captain and wants to irritate him. Yeah, he's a jerk. His saving grace is that he is also an excellent and dedicated detective. He is driven to solve major crimes, especially murders, and to bring justice to "his" victims. He identifies with those victims and will never rest until those who have hurt them are behind bars or dead. Being a detective is who he is. It is part of his DNA. So, it was a bit of a hiccup in his life when he finally had to irrevocably leave the LAPD. He was forced to retire for the second time and this time there is no going back bec...

Can we still call it a police procedural if Harry Bosch is no longer with the police? In his last outing, The Burning Room , Harry was suspended from the LAPD on (as usual) a trumped-up complaint. In order to fight that complaint, he would have been tied up in paperwork for months and months and would have had no salary during that time. With a daughter getting ready to start college, that did not seem to be a viable option. So Harry retired. And then filed suit against the LAPD. We encounter him now, several months later, waiting the resolution of the suit and feeling bored and restless.  He's into restoring an old Harley-Davidson motorcycle, which takes up a few minutes of each day, but the rest of the time he's rattling around looking for things to keep his active mind occupied. Mickey Haller to the rescue! Mickey, the Lincoln Lawyer and Harry's half-brother, has a case on which he needs an investigator. His own regular investigator, Dennis "Cisco" Wojciechowsk...

Harry Bosch is now well into his second - and mandatory - retirement from the LAPD. How will Michael Connelly continue his writing of police procedurals about that flawed agency without his main man? The answer, of course, is to create a new and younger detective whose exploits we can follow, maybe for many years to come. Enter  Renée Ballard .   Ballard is a thirty-something veteran detective with the LAPD. She is from Hawaii originally, but had been brought to California to live with her grandmother after the death of her father in a surfing accident and the abdication of parenthood by her mother. She has a degree in journalism and worked briefly as a journalist before finding her calling with the police. She's had a checkered career with the LAPD, not because of a lack of ability, dedication, and character, but because she is a rocker of the boat. Five years before, while she was working in Homicide, Ballard filed a sexual harassment complaint against her lieutenant, Robert...

Harry Bosch has already retired from the LAPD once, but he came back when they offered a "deferred retirement" program in order to staff up the department. Harry signed on for another five years. Now he is in his 60s and is nearing the end of that five year assignment. He has just about a year to go and he's anxious to solve as many cases as he can during the time he has left, because, as we who have followed him through the years know, solving cases is his life and his calling. How will he fill his time when this last year is finally up? Harry has a new partner for his final year. She is Lucia Soto, a young detective still in her 20s but one who has shown some grit during her short tenure with LAPD. In the previous year, she was involved in a gangland shootout in which her partner and some of the gang members were killed. She survived and became known within the department as Lucky Lucy. Bosch is still working in the Open-Unsolved Unit, dealing mostly with long-dead vict...

Time for another Harry Bosch mystery. The Black Box is the eighteenth book in the series. I'm finally closing in on the end, or at least on the most recent entry. The unique thing about this series has been the unwavering quality of the writing. Connelly just keeps on getting better. Bosch is still with the Open-Unsolved Unit and, in this one, he gets to take another look at a murder that he originally started the investigation on back when it happened in 1992. It's a murder that he didn't get a chance to solve and so it has haunted him for twenty years. In the spring of 1992, Los Angeles was in turmoil after the trial of the police officers who beat Rodney King. Riots broke out after the acquittal of the officers and many people were injured or killed. One of those killed was a young photo-journalist from Denmark named Anneke Jespersen. It was never determined why she was in the area at the time or what she was doing. Was her killing simply an incidental occurrence of the...

I decided to ring out my reading year of 2016 with an old friend, Detective Harry Bosch of the LAPD. I felt a bit of trepidation in doing so, because the last two Bosch mysteries that I had read had been rather disappointing, not up to Connelly's usual standard. I needn't have worried; the writer is back on form with The Drop . This entry finds Detective Bosch back with the open-unsolved case unit of the LAPD, still with David Chu as his partner. Their relationship is abrasive at best, and Harry continues to be pretty much of a jerk in his attitude toward the younger detective, who seems to be trying really hard to please the old pro. Harry has already retired once from LAPD and then returned, and now he is on the cusp of mandatory retirement. He has just received the news that his request for a deferment of that retirement has been granted. He has 39 months left before he has to turn in the badge and he is desperate for cases to solve within that time frame. On one day, he get...

Is Michael Connelly bored with Harry Bosch? Hard to believe and yet three consecutive entries in this series have been sub-par, with this one being the weakest of the lot. Connelly is still going strong with the series; this one is number 15 and there are six more to go as I write this. Each new book still shows up on the best seller list, so maybe he got fresh inspiration and the books got better after this one, but that doesn't lessen my disappointment.  The book starts off interestingly enough and with the fast pace that we've come to expect from Connelly. The owner of a small liquor shop in South L.A. is shot to death in his shop. His name was John Li and he was known to Bosch from years before when he took refuge in the shop when he was working to control a riot in the area. He feels deeply moved by the man's death and promises his family that he will find his killer. It soon develops that cultural differences will play a part in the investigation. The murdered man was...

The Overlook by Michael Connelly My rating: 3 of 5 stars It begins with Harry Bosch, newly reassigned to Homicide Division of the LAPD, getting a call from his lieutenant in the middle of the night. A body has been found on the Mulholland overlook. It is a man who had been shot execution-style with two bullets to the back of the head. The body was found next to his car which had its trunk left open. On the floor of the trunk, indentations in the carpet showed that something very heavy and square had been positioned there, but whatever it was is now gone. Bosch and his new partner, Ignacio Ferras, are assigned to the case, but very soon the FBI shows up. It develops that the heavy thing which had been carried in the car's trunk was a lead "pig" which contained radioactive cesium. The murdered man was a medical physicist who worked with several hospitals that handled radioactive medical material. The investigation reveals that, at the last hospital he visited, he took the ...

Echo Park by Michael Connelly My rating: 4 of 5 stars Time for another Bosch fix for my reading addiction. Echo Park is number 12 in the Michael Connelly's popular series, and it is up to his usual standards. We are in 2006 and, as we learned in the last book, Bosch has given up on retirement and returned to LAPD to work cold cases in the Open/Unsolved Unit. He's once again teamed with one of his former partners, Kiz Rider. The truth is Bosch never stopped working cold cases, even during his brief retirement. There are certain cases from his past that he was unable to clear and that haunt him still. One of those is the Marie Gesto case. The young woman disappeared in 1993. Bosch and his then partner, Jerry Edgar, worked the case but were never able to make an arrest, even though Bosch had a guy in his sights that he felt was probably the perpetrator. No trace of Marie was ever found, but Bosch is sure she is dead. He has kept in touch with her parents all the years since thei...

The Closers by Michael Connelly My rating: 4 of 5 stars When I last encountered Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch, he had left the LAPD and was working as a private detective. But after three years away from the force, he misses it and when he learns that certain personnel would no longer be there to torment him and that the new police chief is open to his returning, he decides to go back. The decider is that he will be able to work with his former partner Kizmir Rider in a new unit called Open-Unsolved. These are old murder cases that have grown cold but are not forgotten. Working old cases has always been Harry's strength. He is in his element here. The first case assigned to Harry and Kiz is a seventeen-year-old murder of a teenage girl who was taken from her home at night and killed. She was at first thought to be a runaway but her body was found a few days later on a mountain behind the family home. The autopsy revealed that she had recently had an abortion, unknown to her family and...

The Narrows by Michael Connelly My rating: 5 of 5 stars When it comes to reading series, I admit I am obsessive/compulsive. I read the books in the order of their publication and, if I find that I have accidentally read one out of order, I circle back and read the overlooked book(s) as soon as possible. Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series is one of my favorites, but I hate it when he combines Harry with one of his other primary characters in books. I don't really mind Mickey, the Lincoln Lawyer, but I never liked Terry McCaleb. So, when it came time for me to read #10 in the Bosch series and I downloaded it to my Kindle and noticed the description of it as "Terry McCaleb #3" I groaned aloud and considered skipping it. Then my OCD kicked in and I started to read. It didn't take long for my groan to become a chuckle. In the first few pages of the book, we find that Connelly has killed off Terry McCaleb. Nice move, Michael! Terry had had a heart transplant and had...

Lost Light by Michael Connelly My rating: 4 of 5 stars Harry Bosch, Private Eye??? Really??? No more Detective Three Harry Bosch of the LAPD??? Hard to believe for us long-time readers of the series, but I guess we have to accept it. After twenty-eight years with the LAPD, Harry Bosch has hung up his shield. In the last book, City of Bones , Harry left his badge and gun and walked out of the police station with the intention of retiring, but I never figured for a moment that it would stick. I felt sure he'd be back in the saddle in the next book. Well, he is, but it's a different horse. As this book begins, Harry is fifty-two and has been retired for a couple of years, and he's getting a bit antsy. When he left the LAPD, he took some of his case files with him - cold cases that he hadn't been able to solve. They haunt him. His mission in life has always been to be an advocate for the murder victims, to give them a measure of justice. It rankles that in these particular...

City of Bones by Michael Connelly My rating: 4 of 5 stars My husband and I recently watched the Amazon series Bosch based on Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch books. I thought it was excellent and I highly recommend it to anyone who enjoys that sort of thing. The story told in City of Bones was one of the ones that was dramatized for the television series, but there were differences between what appeared on screen and Connelly's written version. I think I like the book better, although the dramatization was interesting also. The story begins on New Year's Day when a dog returns to his owner, while they are walking in the Hollywood Hills, carrying a bone he has dug up. His owner is a retired doctor and he recognizes the bone as the humerus of a child. He contacts the police and Harry Bosch, working the holiday, takes the call. Harry goes to the area and begins the search for other bones. He finds them pretty easily. They are scattered over an area up in the hills. It looks l...

A Darkness More Than Night by Michael Connelly My rating: 4 of 5 stars Harry Bosch has been with LAPD for twenty-eight years, more than half of those years as a homicide detective. He's now a detective third-grade, which means that he is team leader on investigations. In that capacity, he led his two partners in the investigation of the suspicious death of a woman several months ago. The woman's body was discovered by her roommate. She was naked, lying on her bed, posed in a way that would lead one to suppose that she died accidentally during a self-manipulated erotic asphyxiation. Harry has seen a few such deaths and he almost immediately suspects that this one isn't what it appears to be. In the course of the investigation, it is learned that the woman, who was an aspiring actress, was out with a famous movie director on the night she died. Suspicion falls upon the man. A search warrant is executed and the team goes to search his house, where nothing related to the crime...