The murder of a high-profile civil rights lawyer is just the trigger for another far-ranging case for L.A. cop Harry Bosch (Trunk Music, 1997, etc.). Howard Elias was widely known as the man who made a good living by suing the LAPD. So now that he's been shot, along with inoffensive cleaning woman Catalina Perez, aboard an otherwise empty inclined railway car, cops all over the city are cheering. What's not to like? wonders Bosch. Only two things: the likelihood that Elias was helped to his grave by one of the hundreds of officers now toasting his death, and the certainty that the public will scream coverup and react in riotous fury if Bosch turns up anybody but a fellow cop as a suspect. Under pressure to satisfy Deputy Chief Irvin Irving, who's determined to put his own Rainbow Coalition p.r. spin on every development, and to work peacefully with the Internal Affairs officers he's been saddled with, Bosch soon focuses on Elias's latest client: Michael Harris, the scruffy suspect who maintains that his confession in the murder of pre-teen Stacey Kincaid had been beaten out of him by cops who jumped on their first slim lead that came their way. But even as Bosch is turning up evidence that indicates Harris might be innocent after all—many sordid, though unsurprising, revelations here—the net is closing around his former partner Frankie Sheehan, a Robbery-Homicide detective on the Harris case who'd already caught the eye of Internal Affairs when he killed a suspect in an earlier case. Bosch sweats to exonerate his old friend and find a substitute killer, but Deputy Chief Irving, who can't forget O.J. and Rodney King, is just not that interested in getting Sheehan off the hook. Reliable suspense on a grand scale, though the half-hearted attention to the suspects and Harry's perfunctory domestic troubles, as well as the lack of a powerfully mysterious center, make this the most routine of Connelly's eight world-class thrillers.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-316-15219-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1998
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.
Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.
Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s (I Found You, 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.
Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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