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Michael Connelly remains a master of intrigue and suspense
Book Review
By Derryll White
Connelly, Michael (2015). The Crossing.
Michael Connelly is an author who invests deeply in his characters. He has pushed poor Harry Bosch to the wall so many times in the past. Finally, having retired under a bureaucratic cloud from the Los Angeles Police Department, Bosch has confronted the realities of his life and crossed over to the dark side.
Working with his half-brother, the Lincoln Lawyer Mickey Haller, Harry faces the possibility that some criminals get wrongly charged. ‘The Crossing’ is just that, Harry crossing over to work for the defense and burning some of his LAPD bridges.
Connelly deals with belief here, can what we see be trusted to be the truth? Harry Bosch is forced to place a lot of previous beliefs behind him when he starts to work for the defense. Harry starts digging and realizes that the police department is not all good guys. His crisis of conscience is one that will seem very familiar to many readers. That is Michael Connelly’s true value as a writer – he creates a fast paced, exciting story and pulls the reader in to play a part in the discourse. He remains a master of intrigue and suspense.
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CROSSING – It was difficult work. Bosch never got accustomed to viewing crime scenes. He had been to hundreds of them and seen the result of human inhumanity too many times to count. He always thought that if he got used to it, then he had lost something inside that was needed to do the job right. You had to have an emotional response. It was that response that lit the match that started the fire of relentlessness.
CROSSING POINT – If Lexi Parks had served on a criminal courts jury, that would have been an important arena for investigators to look into. It would have put her in a building where there was a routine flow of criminals and accused criminals. In a case like this, where the victim appeared to be chosen at random, there is always a crossing point. The place where the predator first encountered his prey. The job of the investigators is to find the crossing, the place where the circle of the victim’s life overlaps the circle of the predator.
– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them. When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.
