An LAPD homicide detective must choose between justice and vengeance as he teams up with the FBI in the first novel of the "thrilling" Harry Bosch series (New York Times Book Review).
For maverick LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal . . . because the murdered man was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who had fought side by side with him in a hellish underground war. Now Bosch is about to relive the horror of Nam. From a dangerous maze of blind alleys to a daring criminal heist beneath the city, his survival instincts will once again be tested to their limit. Pitted against enemies inside his own department and forced to make the agonizing choice between justice and vengeance, Bosch goes on the hunt for a killer whose true face will shock him.
Please note that this book is not a first edition.
I always enjoy a solid detective caper, and Michael Connelly's first novel delivered, with a few downsides. My complaints mostly revolve around the dialogue - it's painfully unnatural. It's like he listened to his teachers who told him not to use contractions in formal writing and decided to apply that to his fiction. Everyone was also a little melodramatic and over-the-top - over and over again, I kept thinking, "Give me a break, people don't talk like that!"
Editing problems also detracted from the story - iced tea is referred to as "ice tea," Barney's Beanery is spelled "Barnie's" - given that the author seems to know Los Angeles, his misspelling of the popular bar is puzzling and someone should have caught that.
Finally, some of the bad guys seem to be bad for the sake of being bad. The deputy chief character is confusing. I won't go into details to avoid spoilers, but his final scene seems inconsistent with the rest of his story. The two IAD officers gunning for the main character also have murky motives - I don't think it was ever explained why they wanted to take him down so badly.
I always approach debut novels with a little more slack than I do later books, so I appreciate that Connelly spins a good mystery and an delivers an unforeseen twist at the very end. I'll read at least a couple more of his books (I have a 3-in-1 anthology from the library) and hope that his editors polished them up a little more.
Reading updates
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Started reading
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9 June, 2008:
Finished reading
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9 June, 2008:
Reviewed