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Michael Connelly still a writer worth reading
Book Review
By Derryll White
Connelly, Michael (2019). The Night Fire.
Michael Connelly is a very intuitive and intelligent writer. He has created gold with the character of Harry Bosch, championing him through some 22 novels.
Connelly let Bosch get older, as he should, retiring him from the L.A. Police Department. Instead of casting him aside, however, the author teamed Harry with Late Show (midnight shift) detective Renée Ballard. A young and clever woman, partnered with an old and wise loose cannon, has given Connolly an exciting new series.
As with many of his novels, here Connelly gives the reader clear insights into how a very large police force works. It is cumbersome, unwieldly, and open to manipulation by the smart and devious pair of Bosch and Ballard.
Connelly also offers many insights into a Los Angeles visitors seldom see. It is a sprawling, dark city peopled with the gangster and the glitterati. An interesting place to read about, but probably not somewhere that a quiet mountain dweller should aspire to.
Michael Connelly continues to be a writer worth reading.
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Excerpts from the novel:
ABUSE – On her way out of RHD, she tried to calm herself and control her emotions. It was difficult, Olivia would always be able to get to her. She knew that. He had taken something from her, as other men had in the past. But the others had paid in one way or another: comeuppance… revenge…justice – whatever the term. But not Olivas. Not so far. At best he had been left with a temporary blemish on his reputation that was gone soon enough. Ballard knew she could outwit and out-investigate him all she wanted, but he would still always have the unnameable thing he had taken from her.
POLITICAL REALITIES – There was a somber silence hanging over everything. A highly trained SWAT team had killed the wife of a suspect under arrest. It was a colossal failure of tactics. Added to that, the dead woman was black and this would invariably draw massive public scrutiny and protest. It would invariably lead to rumors that the victim had been unarmed and simply gunned down. The true story – as bad as it was on its own – would be bent to the needs of those with agendas or axes to grind in the public forum. Everybody on scene knew this and it resulted in a blanket of dread descending over the proceedings on the residential street in Rialto.
– 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.
