Series: Book 2 in the Harry Bosch series
Rating: ****
Tags: Bosch; Harry (Fictitious character), Michael Connelly, Los Angeles (Calif.), Detective and mystery stories, Police, Police - Mortality, Los Angeles (Calif.) - Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Police - California - Los Angeles, Bosch; Harry (Fictitious character) - Fiction, Police Procedural, General, California, Mystery fiction, Police - California - Los Angeles - Fiction, Los Angeles, Thrillers, Suspense, Fiction, Police - Mortality - Fiction, Mortality, Lang:en
Summary
LAPD detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch, protagonist of
the highly praised mystery The Black Echo , returns in a
procedural thriller set in and around the drug-trafficking
underworlds of inner-city Los Angeles and the wastelands of
Mexico. When Bosch arrives at a sleazy hotel room where a
fellow officer has committed suicide, he senses that
something is awry. Noncommittal superior officers, a
diffident widow and tales linking the dead man to a newly
created street drug called "black ice" (heroin, crack and PCP
rolled into one) send Bosch down a winding trail of forensic
impossibilities, brutally violent drug traffickers and an
ultimately shocking case of mistaken identity. Award-winning
Connelly's second fictional effort is strong and sure. His
pacing could be better--too often he conveys the same
information twice--but his plot and characters more than make
up for a slow start. This novel establishes him as a writer
with a superior talent for storytelling.
Second tense, tightly wound tangle of a case for
Hieronymous Bosch (The Black Echo, 1991). This time out, the
LAPD homicide cop, who's been exiled to Hollywood Division
for his bumptious behavior, sniffs out the bloody trail of
the designer drug black ice.'' Connelly (who covers crime for
the Los Angeles Times) again flexes his knowledge of cop
ways--and of cop-novel clich‚s. Cast from the hoary
mold of the maverick cop, Bosch pushes his way onto the
story's core case--the apparent suicide of a narc--despite
warnings by top brass to lay off. Meanwhile, Bosch's boss, a
prototypical pencil-pushing bureaucrat hoping to close out a
majority of Hollywood's murder cases by New Year's Day, a
week hence, assigns the detective a pile of open cases
belonging to a useless drunk, Lou Porter. One of the cases,
the slaying of an unidentified Hispanic, seems to tie in to
the death of the narc, which Bosch begins to read as murder
stemming from the narc's dirty involvement in black ice. When
Porter is murdered shortly after Bosch speaks to him, and
then the detective's love affair with an ambitious
pathologist crashes, Bosch decides to head for Mexico, where
clues to all three murders point. There, the well-oiled, ten-
gear narrative really picks up speed as Bosch duels with
corrupt cops; attends the bullfights; breaks into a
fly-breeding lab that's the distribution center for Mexico's
black-ice kingpin; and takes part in a raid on the kingpin's
ranch that concludes with Bosch waving his jacket like a
matador's cape at a killer bull on the rampage. But the
kingpin escapes, leading to a not wholly unexpected
twist--and to a touching assignation with the dead narc's
widow. Expertly told, and involving enough--but lacking the
sheer artistry and heart-clutching thrills of, say, David
Lindsay's comparable Stuart Haydon series (Body of Evidence,
etc.). --
Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights
reserved.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Kirkus Reviews