City of Bones

Amazon.com

Since his first appearance in 1992's Edgar-winning The Black Echo , Detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch has joined Dennis Lehane's Patrick and Angie, George Pelecanos's Derek Strange, and Greg Rucka's Atticus Kodiak in the pantheon of new-school hard-boiled detectives. Rather than giving Bosch a clever gimmick (like Jeffery Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme, who is a quadriplegic), Michael Connelly embraces the noir archetype: Bosch, an L.A. homicide detective, is a chain-smoking loner who refuses to play by his superiors' rules. Although he has quit smoking, Harry's still the same tightlipped outsider, taking each crime as a personal affront as he tries to cleanse his beloved city of the darkness he sees engulfing it. In City of Bones , Connelly's eighth Bosch title, Bosch and his well-dressed partner, Jerry Edgar, are working to identify a child's skeleton, buried for 20 years in the forest off Hollywood's Wonderland Drive, and to bring the killer to belated justice. For Bosch this is more than just another homicide, as the mystery child, beaten and abandoned, comes to represent much of what he sees as evil in his city. Add in a tragic love affair with a fellow cop, complications from overzealous media, and the growing feeling that he's fighting a losing battle about which no one cares, and the usually stoic Bosch is pushed to his limits. This isn't the strongest plot Connelly has concocted for Bosch, but it leads to an ending the whole series has been building toward. The conclusion may not shock longtime fans, but it will leave them wondering where the series will go from here. --Benjamin Reese

Format

Broché

Nombre de pages

416

ISBN

0752848348

Editeur

Orion (an Imprint of The Orion Publishing Group Ltd )

Date de publication

2002-11-07

Amazon.co.uk

Michael Connelly's world-weary cop Harry Bosch gets another outing in City of Bones , torn apart by having to investigate the long-ago killing of a much abused boy and by his doomed affair with a much younger woman cop. This is not the best or the most ingenious, but is the gloomiest and perhaps most thoughful, of Connelly's thrillers about Bosch, thrillers which take the assumptions of the police procedural and makes them part of the creation of a mood in which to investigate is to struggle with the tragic forces in life. Connelly is especially good on the more positive aspects of canteen culture, that real desire to protect the innocent and serve society that Bosch calls "the blue religion"; when, as here, a paedophile witness is outed to the press or a suspect shot in dubious circumstances, it is not just good standards of policework, but something more important that is being betrayed. If City of Bones turns out to be the last of Connelly's books about Bosch, or the last in which he is controlled and constrained in his mission of justice by his role as a police officer, it will not be a dying fall to one of the more impressive thriller series of our time. --Roz Kaveney

Auteur

Michael Connelly