I’m dozens of books late to the party, but I’ve finally read my first Michael Connelly book. Again, he’s one of those authors I always see on bookshelves at Half Price Books and Barnes & Noble, but somehow, I’ve never ventured into the world of his detective, Harry Bosch, or his Lincoln Lawyer books. Tonight, I finished the 12th Bosch book (I know, I’m going out of order again!), 2006’s Echo Park.
Bosch is a hard-nosed, stubborn “true detective” in Connelly’s hands. He’s recently returned from retirement and is working in the cold case division, which is apropos because a past case he never could close is back again. Get it, it’s “echoing.” A woman was abducted after leaving the grocery store, and presumably was killed, but her body was never found, nor the killer, despite Bosch leaning hard on the son of a rich Texas oilman as the likeliest suspect.
The thing about Bosch being that “true detective” is that he’s the vintage detective we often see on television: he’s willing to skirt around the rules to catch the person responsible, and ideally, he hopes they fry. And of course, the defense attorney is depicted as slimy and dirty. (Not for nothing, Bosch did think the prosecutor was dirty at first, but he turned out to be clean.) I don’t fault that track — that’s what has made Bosch such an endurable character in popular fiction, I imagine, is that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to catch the bad guy — but my sensibility isn’t totally geared toward that. I’m a stickler for cops following the rules, and if you can’t catch the bad guy within those parameters, then what you’re doing to go beyond them can have downstream negative effects for innocent people. But I’ll digress away from my soapbox.
I still like Bosch! I like his hard-nosed determination, particularly the fact that 13 years later, he still cares about the case of the missing girl and finding the culprit. That is the other facet of his “true detective” philosophy: caring. It probably takes a toll on him, and his personal life, but it’s the price he’s willing to pay for being a true detective.
A serial killer, Waits, ends up confessing to the crime and leading the cops to the girl’s body. Like Bosch, I was skeptical. It seemed too neat and tidy, and Bosch concurs. (For what it’s worth, and again, I level these criticisms constructively, I thought the interview Bosch conducts with Waits didn’t read like a serial killer talking to me; it almost felt a little try-hard, which was part of my skepticism that he was responsible for the girl’s death.) When they go on a “field trip” to the girl’s body, Waits uses that moment to escape and in so doing, kills two cops and nearly fatally wounds Bosch’s partner. That was probably the peak action scene of the whole book. It was shocking, even though I suspected Waits would try to escape; I didn’t expect it to work.
As it turns out, a near-retirement cop, who was Bosch’s boss in the cold case division, took a payout of $1 million from the oilman to finger the serial killer for the crime and throw Bosch off the scent of his son. But again, Bosch is too much of a hardscrabble type to let it go. He figures it out, sets up the oilman and his son to incriminate themselves, and in the process, the hothead son kills Bosch’s dirty boss and then is killed by a FBI agent on the scene. Talk about wrapping up everything in a nice, violent bow.
Despite the two criticisms I’ve leveled at the book (Bosch breaking the rules, and the unbelievability of the serial killer), there is no doubt about the Miami Herald blurb on the cover of the mass paperback edition of the book: “breathtakingly suspenseful.” I was devouring the book yesterday and finished it off today because I had to see what was going to happen, and there were enough juicy twists and turns dotted with action set pieces and revealing dialogue to keep me going. As a “starter book” for Connelly’s work, it made me want to read more Bosch novels (and try out the Lincoln Lawyer ones, too).
Milam's Musings 