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In this time of Trump, this author offers some relief
Book Review
By Derryll White
Connelly, Michael (2022). Desert Star.
“Connelly is the most consistently superior living crime fiction author… His affinity for creating strong, realistic women characters shines in Renée Ballard… while keeping Harry Bosch vital and important… Connelly reenergizes the police procedural.” Oline H. Cogdill
Michael Connelly develops superb complex characters, and he is flexible about how he brings them into his stories. Harry Bosch is an older (beginning with The Black Echo – 1992), now retired detective and a character that Connelly has built much of his prolific (approximately 40 novels) career on. Those who read Connolly regularly know that the author always exerts himself to fill in even more of Bosch’s background and moral universe.
Some time ago Connelly left Hieronymus Bosch in retirement and crafted a new dynamic female lead, Renée Ballard. She, like Bosch, came to work in the Los Angeles Police Department, resisted the ‘old boys club’ nature of the department and, like Bosch a decade before, got into trouble. Inevitably, many novels later, they came together – working cold cases.
Harry Bosch is a character who is willing to bend the rules, and stress the bureaucracy, to gain a resolution to the understandable misery of a family who has had a member murdered. He makes a moral commitment to each case, to do his best to resolve it and grant surcease to troubled souls. Bosch (and Ballard) does not suffer politicians or pretenders well. In this time of Trump, Connelly offers some relief.
It is not clear at the end of ‘Desert Star’ whether or not the reader might be seeing the last of Harry Bosch. Michael Connolly is still relatively young so interested parties might want to look for more recent releases.
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Excerpts from the novel:
OUR NEIGHBOUR – Many retired LAPD officers moved as far away from the place they had worked as was possible and affordable. Idaho was a favored spot, called Blue Heaven by many for its low crime, clean air, conservative politics, and don’t-tread-on-me attitude.
TODAY – “It’s an angry world,” Bosch said. “People do things you’d never expect. That they’d never expect themselves.”
Ballard nodded.
“I get it.”
“No. I hope you never get it.”
HOPE – “And these flowers, they’re amazing,” Ballard said.
“Desert star,” Bosch said. “I know a guy, says they’re a sign of god in this fucked-up world. That they’re relentless and resilient against the heat and the cold, against everything that wants to stop them.”
Ballard nodded.
“Like you,” Bosch added.
– 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.
