American Detective

American Detective: Behind the Scenes of Famous Criminal Investigations
© 2018  Thomas Reppetto
312 pages

I've been playing through L.A. Noire lately, and its use of real-life crime (the Black Dahlia case)  prompted me to look for anything written about it. American Detective only mentions the Dahlia case,  using it in  Reppetto's history of American detective units,  their decline in the late 20th century, and the need for them to make a comeback.  Reppetto writes from both research and experience, having previous been a commander of detectives in Chicago.  American Detective is a mix of straightforward histories of various crimes and enterprises across the United States (mostly in larger cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and  Cleveland), and including serial killers, bank robbers, and organized crime.    The writing can be dry, especially when it's just one case after another, but Reppetto does warm up, especially when he shifts from fact-delivery to reflection.

  In covering the rise of municipal detective bureaus, Reppetto attributes their takeover of American policing to the complications of mobility and immigration, both of which required more focused, deliberate, and sustained investigations than ordinary patrolmen could offer.  At their prime, American detectives were an elite force  -- patrolling their city, constantly gathering information and building a network of informants who would come in handy in the event of an investigation. Corruption, political and otherwise, coupled with increasing bureaucratization which forced detectives to become specialists who worked cases instead of generalists who worked the city,  diminished their performance , while at the same time  politicians began touting approaches to law enforcement that  emphasized the role of the ordinary patrol officers.  Reppetto believes that "community policing" was never clearly defined, and argues that detective bureaus should reclaim their midcentury prominence. 


As a book, American Detective delivers a lot of interesting back stories behind famous personalities and crimes, along with less interesting ones. That may be a matter of taste, or delivery; I'd liken the book to sitting at a railway intersection and watching a train go by. There's much of interest, but there are also long stretches of literary boxcars,  fairly featureless.    There's a lot of little tidbits in here, though, so  if you're an avid reader of true crime, it's probably worth checking into.  Personally, having spotted that Reppetto has also done some works on the Sicilian Mafia, I may read a little more of him.

Metropolis

Metropolis
© 2019 Phillp Kerr
384 pages

At the height of Weimar decadence, young Bernie Gunther is invited to join the Murder Commission. It’s a step up from Vice, and the department needs every watchful eye and quick wit it can get:  the city’s prostitutes and disabled veterans are both being methodically hunted and shot.   With the usual avenues of  investigation producing nothing,  Bernie takes to the streets as a legless victim of the Somme, hoping  he’ll hear words from a little closer to the ground – and from sources who wouldn’t go near the police.    Although this is the last Bernie Gunther novel (his creator having passed just over a year ago),  it’s also a prequel of a kind:  this Bernie still carries  a lot of  bruised, youthful naitive with him: he’s not the cool, jaded detective of the forties and fifties,  and it’s this case that will make him a little more weary of the world.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Kerr’s Gunther novels, I stopped reading them four years ago on the grounds that they were far too depressing.    Gunther’s report from his case in The Lady of Zagreb, for instance, was so gruesome that even Goebbels was unnerved by it.  Metropolis, despite its scalpings and cold-blooded murders, is not quite as morbid as the rest – although it’s definitely shaking for young Bernie, whose sub rosa inquiries take him into a bar popular with some of the most depraved souls in Berlin – and that’s saying something, given that Weimar Berlin  has become popular for the kind of sex tourism that now favors Thailand.    And yet there’s light in the darkness, as  Gunther finds a reason for climbing out of the bottle (he drinks like a Raymond Chandler lead at the beginning).

Like most of Kerr’s novels, Metropolis is not a piece to comfort the soul with warm fuzzies. It’s often disturbing, but the dark humor is here, too, and Kerr’s skillful pen makes even the grim go down sweet.

Head On

Head On: A Novel of the Near Future
© 2018 John Scalzi
328 pages

Agent Chris Shane of the FBI saw the man decapitated on the playing field. before his very eyes.  But so did thousands of other people; decapitations  were, in fact,  the point of the game. Hilketa, after all, is a sport in which human-controlled droids go into battle against one another,  trying to tear the head off a randomly-designated player-droid and carry it across the goalposts while the defending team stops them.  This is a game played with swords. Of course heads are supposed to come off....but people aren't supposed to die.   And yet, the moment Duane Chapman's droid lost his head, the human controlling him inexplicably died.   So it was that Chris and his training partner Van, abuser of many substances,  had their second huge case.  In Head On, Scalzi explores the world of Hadens more thoroughly, from their elaborate digital world to specialized droids -- some for lovers and some for fighters.  Although Van and Chris are able to establish the means easily enough, the question remains: why? Why would someone murder a reasonably popular, reasonably talented  athlete?  The mystery takes readers down familiar paths, from the noir staples like jealous wives, to Scalzi's running joke of Shane destroying a series of personal threeps (the humanoid droid he moves in the world through, his real body being locked-in from Haden syndrome).  Scalzi's Haden-world is just as interesting this time around, though I was more fascinated by Haden culture than the actual murder mystery.

9 Dragons

9 Dragons
© 2009 Michael Connelly
544 pages

Harry Bosch doesn't know who they are.  He doesn't know what they want.  If they're looking for ransom,  he doesn't have money, but he does have is a very particular set of skills, acquired over a long career, skills that make him a nightmare for people who might have abducted his daughter to threaten him away from a case involving a Hong Kong gang.  If they don't let his daughter go, he will look for them, he will find them,  and he will kill them. And he'll still close his case, because that's what Harry Bosch does.  He takes down baddies and then he sits in the dark and listens to jazz.

9 Dragons is an unusual Harry Bosch novel in that it begins as a police procedural before quickly becoming an international action-adventure thriller. Usually, Harry is dealing with pedestrian scum of the earth -- rapists, robbers, etc --  but this time his investigation of an apparent robbery and homicide turns him on to a Chinese gang, one that imperils his ex-wife and daughter living in Hong Kong. He's definitely out of his element, away from his usual resources and forced to rely on people he would otherwise distrust: like an Asian Gang Unit cop who talks too much and  his ex-wife's mysterious Chinese valet.  Although the book is bookended as a procedural, with respect paid to the chain of evidence, laws, that sort of thing, the great in-between is a rip-roaring  manhunt as Bosch tears through Hong Kong's underbelly looking for his daughter -- and adding to the pile of bodies he finds with his own freshly-minted ones. It really isn't smart to kidnap a street detective's daughter and try to sell her for organs, it really isn't.

I enjoyed 9 Dragons well enough as the action thriller it was,  especially with the little cameo played by Mickey Haller (Connelly's other novel series character), but the intrigue of the initial case was quickly sidelined by the action itself. Still, Connelly kept my attention, and it can't be said that he gave Bosch a quick and easy shoot `em up solution:   Bosch has to surrender his pound of flesh before all is said and done.  The greatest appeal of this novel for me -- as someone who always imagines Liam Neeson in the role of Bosch -- was the ability to quote Taken while reading it.

Harry Bosch. He likes brooding, jazz, and fighting with FBI agents over jurisdiction. 

The Black Ice

The Black Ice
© 1993 Michael Connelly
336 pages

A body discovered in a sleazy motel on Christmas Eve connects a handful of otherwise dead cases, and sets Detective Harry Bosch against his own department, culminating in the pursuit of a half-chance to Mexico.  The case was never supposed to be Bosch's;  when a cop suspected being bent showed up missing his face, all the department wanted to do was sweep the victim quietly under the rug. But Harry Bosch was the detective on duty when the call came in, and damned if he's going to be kicked to the side.  As is usual, the solitary brooder -- Bosch opens this novel like seemingly every other, sitting by himself and listening to jazz --  can't stop the feeling that there's more to the story, can't stop looking even when everyone else is telling him to drop it.  Several unsolved cases, suddenly parts of a puzzle that he can see the outlines of as he digs, point to a drug lord in Mexico who is pushing a new product in Los Angeles. That's where Bosch ultimately goes, teaming up with a Mexican officer who is an outsider in his own apartment, and their joint investigation leads to fireworks in the Sonoran dark.  While I haven't read a Bosch novel since 201l,  the character is just as compelling as he first was:  a child of the street turned cop thereof,  forever butting heads with the politicos who run things as he pursues justice on nothing more than his gut instincts, black coffee, and the help of rare friends -- usually women.  Characterization is strong here, both as Connelly is developing Bosch (this is the 2nd Bosch novel) further, and giving him interesting enemies, allies, and hybrid creatures to wrangle with.  Interestingly, early on Bosch encounters Mickey Haller -- of Lincoln Lawyer fame, but not made a lead character until that novel's debut in 2005. 

The Pawnbroker

The Pawnbroker
© 2014 David Thurlo, Aimée Thurlo
304 pages

Charlie and Gordo are two Afghan War vets returning to civilian life, but as it turns out, parts of Albuquerque aren't that much safer than Kabul. When their friend and attorney is gravely injured in a drive-by targeting someone else, the two are obliged by honor to find and wreak vengeance on the shooters. The Pawnbroker opens with the drive-by and is loaded with fist fights and shoot-outs; Charlie and Gordon's roles in these affairs is gamely tolerated by the ABQ PD, in part because one of their officers is the live-in girlfriend of the attorney . Perhaps the definitive scene is the two leads, standing back to back and taking down a gang of tattooed gangstas with Krav Maga. The scene is later described as being one out of Rush Hour. It's accurate, because this is a buddy-cop movie in book form, but instead of two suited lady-charmers, we have two working class soldiers turned business partners. The book is filled with the kind of action Rush Hour provides, although the wisecracking isn't quite as abundant. The plot is reasonably tangled, so it's an enjoyable thriller for passing time.

Comments welcome, but I'm somewhere in the mountains..

Rising Sun

Rising Sun
385 pages
© 1992 Michael Crichton

In downtown Los Angeles, in a gleaming tower of Japanese commercial success, a woman lies dead on a boardroom table.  The  grand opening of the Nakamoto Corporation's downtown skyscraper attracted celebrities and politicians alike, all anxious to impress the Japanese businessmen who play such an important part in the U.S. economy. It was supposed to be a festive occasion, but instead it's turned into a source of anxiety and dread:  this murder-in-the-office stuff is very bad for publicity. It turns out to be a major source of trouble for the police assigned to investigate, too, because to Nakamoto, business is war...and if trouble-making cops can't be bribed, they can be 'removed'.

Rising Sun combines a police procedural with a business thriller, and ends with an ominous note from Crichton that the Japanese are taking over the American economy and we'd better do something.  Published just as the Japanese were drifting into their 'lost decade', that warning now makes it seem slightly dated. Despite this, the technological aspect gives the book a solid sci-fi edge;  though set in the 1990s, we see wireless cameras, facial-recognition software,  and image manipulation so intensive that the courts no longer permit imagery as evidence.  Here we have forensic technology long before CSI made it popular,  but most of the character-lecturing is done in regards to Japanese culture, history, and business practices.  I know next to nothing about Japanese economic history, so I don't know when Crichton leaves history  behind for alt-history here. His 1990s-America is virtually a Japanese economic colony, with only its university system keeping it from being an utter subordinate. So awed by the Japanese are these Americans that Japanese lingo has crept into common usage among the political and business elite, and their power is such that LA cops have a time getting the Nakamoto Corp's officers to let them investigate.  I was a little suspicious of Crichton's economic doomsaying; if the Japanese were 'dumping' under-priced goods onto the American market, why couldn't those goods be purchased by American companies and sold as their own?    Crichton's fear is not quite as irrelevant as it seems, because today we hear the same fears about China. right down to the concern that their ownership of so much  American debt is a national security problem.  Awareness that there must be a line between national security and profitable participation in the global economy has become an issue in the presidential debate this year as well.

Despite being dated in some ways, Rising Sun made for a very interesting read, both as a technologically-savvy police novel ahead of the curve, and as an alt-history piece which features Japanese characters and culture heavily.

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
256 pages
© 1894 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Has it been five years since I read a Holmes collection? I remember picking up Memoirs shortly after reading The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, not nothing that Memoirs was published well before that, but I fell into distraction at some point. More's the pity, because here collected are eleven classic stories that include both the beginning and the (first) end of Holmes' career, "The Gloria Scott" and "The Final Problem".   It contains a few iconic scenes; Holmes stalking about in his cape and seeming to read Watson's mind, as well as some of his best lines:

"Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
"To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
"The dog did nothing in the night-time."
 "That was the curious incident."

Some Trek author inserted those lines into a novel years ago and it absolutely mystified me. Well, glad to have cleared that up. (On that Trek note, I must say that The Next Generation deceived me in regards to Professor Moriarty. He's charming onscreen, but decidedly uncharismatic here. Granted ,his only appearance is to threaten Holmes with death if he doesn't keep plotting the 'Napoleon of Crime's" Waterloo.)  Memoirs has the same engaging writing as the previous collections, and adds some interesting aspects to Holmes' character, namely his eccentric home decor (storing cigars in Persian slippers, using the wall as target practice).

A few of the mysteries:

• "Silver Blaze": A prize horse has gone missing. (Okay, granted, it's not as ambitious as the missing train from Further Adventures, but it's still very mysterious.)
• "The Musgrave Ritual": A brilliant butler vanishes after being caught studying nonsensical couplets used in an initiation ritual. Could it be that he divined some meaning into the lines?
• "The Gloria Scott":  What secret does a cranky sailor have over this nervous country squire?
• "The Greek Interpeter": A man is driven into the middle of nowhere and used to question a Greek man being held against his will --- why?
• "The Cardboard Box":  Who ordered two human ears packed in salt? 

I think I've gone through all the short stories my library has access to, so when next I visit Baker Street, it will be for a full novel!

The Lady from Zagreb

The Lady from Zagreb
© 2015 Phillip Kerr
432 pages

            Bernie Gunther was an ordinary police detective in wild, wonderful Weimar until Germany’s economy collapsed and fringe parties swept into power. His police department absorbed by the SS, he wears the uniform of a party and of an ideology he loathes – and does a poor job of even pretending to tolerate. His antipathy for the Party makes a man of Bernie’s talents a useful tool, however, at least to Joseph Goebbels. With no career prospects or political ambition, the detective can be hired for a little bit of innocent work that the master of deceit would prefer to keep concealed from his rivals in evil miniondom, like Himmler.  For instance, Goebbels has his eye on a certain starlet who is waffling on cinema as a career prospect, despite being a Siren-like beauty who is sure to become the continent’s most popular actress.  Officially, of course, the chief of propaganda wants to keep her engaged making films to glorify the fatherland,  but he also has more intimate engagements in mind – the kind that married men have no business in making.   The problem is that the poor dear is distracted by her long-missing father, lost in war-torn Yugoslavia. What he’d like for Gunther to do is pop down to the most hellish place in Europe short of Auschwitz for a spell, find dear old dad, and then report back to Berlin.

Nothing is ever so simple, of course. Gunther has already encountered some soul-harrowing scenes since the Nazis took power in 1933;  he has seen massacres on both the Soviet and Nazi sides of the battle-lines, and  been exposed to the Final Solution in action.  Yugoslavia, however, is a bloodbath to be endured only with the native whiskey,:Gunther’s report makes even Goebbels blanch at the horror of it.  There,  the princes of hell on earth decorate their strongholds with skulls on pikes, and photographs of executions, like something out of a nightmare.  The usual psychological defenses – sarcasm, booze, and cigarettes – don’t quite do the trick. To survive, Gunther counterattacks: he falls in love. If the hormone rush from becoming infatuated with Germany's foremost sex symbol doesn't do the trick, then perhaps the thrill of chasing a girl who is not only married, but a mistress-potential for one of the most powerful men in the reich will.  Eventually the action moves to Switzerland,  where Americans mistake Gunther for a German general and hilarity ensues. Amid even more death, however, the piece of a puzzle which has lingered on Gunther's mind for a year finally falls into place.

The Lady from Zagreb is a very well-done detective novel,  putting its wartime Europe setting to good effect and linking several mysteries together. The humor is biting, as ever;  on learning that a fellow officer is writing yet another novel, Gunther comments that there will always be room in Germany for more novels, provided his countrymen keep burning them. In an early scene, a man is literally killed by Hitler; a bust of Adolf is used  as a bludgeon. Against the backdrop of both the Holocaust and the obscene carnage of Yugoslavia, however, even that humor fails to prevent this from being an utterly distressing novel, set in a land of desecration and filled with horror and manipulation. Not even Gunther's relationship with Dalia is free from the cloud of horror, unsurprising given Goebbels' close presence.  Certainly there's no fault in creativity or research; the book is littered with odd little details that must have been strange research finds, like a U-boat parked on the autobahn; one of Gunther's escapes is especially captivating.  As thrilling as it is, Zagreb is more than touch dispiriting on the whole, however.

Whiskey Sour

Whiskey Sour: A Jack Daniels Mystery
 © 2004 J.A. Konrath
288 pages

Somewhere in the city of Chicago is a sexual sadist, and it's Jack Daniels's task to bring him down. Jacqueline Daniels is your standard world-weary detective, tough as nails and married to the job. A member of the city's Violent Crime Units, she certainly doesn't have the time to maintain a marriage outside the job. Even when she plays pool for recreation, it's against a fella she once arrested -- and when she tries to date, well!  Things go awry, boyfriends wind up hostages with collapsed lungs. Such is the case when Jack becomes a sociopath's fixation, his great and worthy opponent. The sicko calls himself the Gingerbread Man, and he's a meticulous  S.O.B. who leaves nary a breadcrumb behind -- except when he wants to lead cops into an ambush. Whiskey Sour is the first in a series of detective thrillers with similarly inspired names (Fuzzy Naval, for instance), appropriate given hardboiled detectives' penchant for nursing stiff drinks. One might be required after reading this, for while dashedly effective as a thriller, delivering one-two punches of laughs and retches of horror,  the author's style of alternating between the detective's point of view and the psycho's leaves one feeling sick to the stomach.  There are the familiar stocks of detective fiction (cynical lead, bumbling bureaucrats, informants and bent cops) as well as some of the most gruesome scenes from our own headlines. Entertaining? Utterly -- but with a little too much dwelling on the obscene and gratuitous for me.

If the Dead Rise Not

If the Dead Rise Not
© 2011 Phillip Kerr
464 pages

            Bernie Gunther would be your standard-issue world-weary detective were it not for the fact that he just killed a Nazi.  Gunther has no love for the Nazis, who took power in his beloved Germany a year ago, and have in the year 1934 managed to reduce it to a joyless place for those who enjoy fast talk and loose women. Gunther is especially fond of both. Having quit his position in the police department to avoid having to fuss with the cretins in power, Gunther became the house detective of Berlin’s grandest hotel.  As it turns out, however, he has by no means removed himself from danger, and when an obnoxious American gangster claims a Ming dynasty artifact was stolen from his room, Gunther meets a man whose schemes will see the wisecracking detective arrested, and hauled out into the open ocean to be killed.  Though the man Max Reles appears to be a boorish businessman with a few shady operations, in actuality he’s in bed with Hitler – or intent on making der Fuhrer his purse. The political intrigue doesn't stop with Hitler, as the last fifth of the novel takes place in pre-revolutionary Cuba. The odd coupling of time and place that also appeared in Field Grey works here as well. If the Dead Rise Not is in turns disturbing and spectacularly funny;  one of the reasons Gunther can’t avoid trouble is his tendency to shoot off his mouth, and the book features a rolling barrage of one-liners, mostly taking shots at the Nazis. There are the usual thrills, of course – chase scenes, murders, numerous points wherein he seems well and truly doomed – and the obligatory twist and turn of the plot. Disturbing comes with all of the characters tendency to live in moral grey ares; the villain, who by actions ought to be detested, is one of the most entertaining men to read. Even Bernie, for whom he is a principle villain, can’t help but be tempted by liking him.  Happily,  everyone reaps what they sow, and eventually Reles meets the usual end of people who work with those like Meyer Lanksy.

Quotations

"A Nazi is someone who follows Hitler. To be anti-Nazi is to listen to what he says." p. 70

"German history is nothing more than a series of ridiculous mustaches."  p. 73

"These days a considerate German is someone who doesn't knock on your door early in the morning in case you think it's the Gestapo." p. 86

"A German is a man who manages to overcome his worst prejudices. A Nazi is a man who turns them into laws." p. 88

Field Grey

Field Grey
© 2011 Phillip Kerr
384 pages

Bernie Gunther survived Hitler's Germany and a Soviet prison camp, so when he's forcefully detained by the American  Navy on the open seas and interrogated, he's not too much impressed by their attempt at viciousness. Sure,  he had the bad luck to be traveling with an attractive lady who happened to be wanted by the American government for assassinating a cop in Cuba and fomenting revolution, but he's had worse luck.  Back in the 1930s, he once saved the life of another cop killer who is now one of the most powerful men behind the Iron Curtain: Erich Mielke, head of the Stasi. Did I mention Gunther is a detective who actually doesn't like cop-killers?  The US Navy would like to know why Gunther was running around the Caribbean with an assassin and a lot of money -- and the Central Intelligence Agency is even more curious as to his association with the head of the Stasi.  Mockingly thrown into the very prison cell that housed Adolf Hitler, the man who destroyed his country and whom he hated, Gunther is made to tell his own story.

 Field Grey is a tangled political thriller set in  Germany as Hitler came to power and drove it to ruin, but set also in the Germany of the Cold War: a Germany divided by the victorious allies, now scheming against one another in equal measure.  Bernie Gunther is no Nazi, but neither is he a good communist or a reconstructed German: he's a proud, jaded Berliner, and the story he tells is one calculated to guard his most precious secrets from the treacherously friendly Amis.  Field Grey impresses with its pacing; the plot moves forward steadily with a few bends here and there until a hairpin at the end: it doesn't rely on confusing the reader to thrill. Although Gunther is your standard-issue world-weary cynical detective, he has a wicked sense of humor which he uses to good effect to irk enemies and allies alike.  Despite technically being a member of the SS (which absorbed criminal investigations), he's sympathetic yet realistic:  not a Nazi, but not a knight in shining armor, either.  Field Grey is one of numerous Gunther novels by Phillips Kerr, which I selected to read first because it ranged through so many years.  It will not be the last! Look for this if you've an interest in detective mysteries, historical fiction, and Cold War intrigue.

Oh!  And there's romance, naturally. Can't have a detective story without beautiful women..

Related:

• Fatherland, Robert Harris. Likewise a detective novel with a German lead,  this work is also one of alternate history, for it's set in a Europe where Hitler is celebrating his 70th birthday,  presiding in triumph over Europe and a broken Russia, hoping to reach detente with the Americans. Unfortunately for him,  a murder investigation leads to the facts of the Holocaust being unearthed.
• Garden of Beasts, Jeffery Deaver.  Gunther is a proud Berliner, claiming the city as his more readily than anything else, and Beasts is set in 1933 Berlin.  An American reporter shows up during the Olympics and realizes that Hitler is up to something other than building highways. 

Covert

Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob
© 2008 Bob Delaney, Dave Scheiber
288 pages

In the early 1970s, a young and promising New Jersey State Trooper named Bob Delaney was asked to join Project Alpha, a joint police-FBI undercover project intending to take down the New Jersey mob. Assuming the identity of a dead man known (appropriately) as Bobby Covert,  Delaney posed as the head of an ambitious new trucking company  on the New Jersey coast -- making money by shipping stolen goods for the mob.  After the State convinced an informant to join Delaney's team, the operation expanded rapidly. Suddenly he was spending his nights in restaurants chewing the fat with leading wiseguys, even if he avoided making a mistake and getting himself killed, the stress of living multiple lives threatned to send him to an early grave regardless.

Though Covert is billed as criminal nonfiction, it's almost more biographical. Delaney devotes time to his early years and writes on his transition from detective to NBA referee, imparting lessons learned from those careers to the reader: namely, even in this post-9/11 world,  that we cannot allow fear to rule us. DeLaney's emotional struggles while working the investigation made Covert work for me, much more than his tales of basketball and supper with the goodfellas.  DeLaney's work as a businessman isn't dramatic, but it gave the FBI insight into how the Mafia infiltrates and then dominates small businesses. Even though he started off doing small jobs for various New Jersey families, in a matter of a year they began treating it like their own private company.  Like William Queen,  DeLaney's greatest struggle is to maintain his sanity.  Although DeLaney doesn't live a Henry Hill/Goodfellas life, those interested in the Mafia will find this of interest, as it portrays the modern 'la cosa nostra' as nothing more than a bunch of classless thugs who are so utterly removed from what they prented to be that hey rely on The Godfather to gain ideas of what it means to be a mafioso.

Covert should easily be of interest to multiple audiences, including sports fans, given the range of the photos section. I tend to imagine Michael Jordan as a laidback guy, but Covert contains photos of him roaring in anger at the unflappable DeLaney. The state trooper-turned-referee also poses with Ray Liotta, who played Henry Hill in Goodfellas.

Cop Hater

Cop Hater
© 1956 Ed McBain
236 pages

The heat is on for Detective Stephen Carella of the 87th precinct and his fellow officers. As a heat wave reduces the city to misery, someone is murdering the precinct's detectives one by one. The killer's victims are spread across the department too much to have been connected to a single case, and one lead after another fizzles to a dead end. Though the unforgiving heat and increasing body count sap their spirits, Carella and the other detectives are determined to find their killer and take him down. When resolution comes, however, it's from an unexpected corner.

Cop Hater is the first in the 87th Precinct series, Ed McBain (Evan Hunter)'s  most famous body of work. The series is so expansive that I have no intention of attempting to read them in order: this merely caught my attention while at the library. McBain/Hunter has a strange style, one that mixes simple grittiness with sometimes flowery prose. He speaks of tenement buildings reaching into the skies like misty fingers while his main characters talk about who's just been 'knocked off'.  The combination works, though, and the novel's use of multiple viewpoints adds to the suspense: in the introduction, McBain mentions that he wanted to use an entire squadroom of detectives for this series, just so he had the option of imperiling or killing characters when useful, and the potency of that decision is made clear here. One detective is killed within moments of our meeting him, while others survive long enough to ensnare the reader's sympathies before they become victims themselves. I roared through this book in a single sitting, though the ending left me wanting -- seeming more the work of coincidence than detective work. Still, there's no denying McBain can write a thriller, and so I've no doubts I'll be reading more. 

City of Bones

City of Bones
© 2002 Michael Conelly
464 pages

High in the Hollywood hills lies the body of  a young boy, buried for two decades, whose bones bear the scars of a lifetime of abuse. When a dog finds the bones, Hieryonymous Bosch and the LAPD are drawn into a disturbing case that will haunt their minds and cost the men and women in blue the lives of one of their own. While a twenty-year old murder seems a tough prospect to resolve, Harry has two leads: a convicted child molester living nearby, and the boy's own broken family.

I keep returning to Connelly's series out of affection for the main character (who, in my head, takes the form of Liam Neeson in Taken), the loose-cannon detective who lives to make a difference and piss off as many politicians as he can in the process. Connelly spins a good yarn, but City of Bones is more emotionally intense than any of the other Bosch novels I've read. The story of the victim and his family are disturbing enough, but as the case wears on, more innocent lives are lost and Bosch is faced with a personal crisis. The case reveals that everyone has skeletons  waiting in their own closets...and some are not pleasant to unearth.  I'm hoping my library carries Lost Light, the next novel in the series, so I can see what will come of Harry's unprecedented and unexpected decision in the novel's endgame.

Echo Park

Echo Park
© 2006 Michael Connelly
405 pages

Listen to the first chapter being portrayed in film here. 

Harry Bosch may not be the most charismatic, popular, or politically savvy detective in the Los Angeles Police Department, but he takes every case seriously and keeps pursuing leads until he gets his man.  For thirteen years, the case of Marie Gesto has bothered him:  the young woman disappared more than a decade ago, and neither Bosch nor his partner were able to find any suspects. For over a decade, Marie has haunted Bosch, but now her case may be on the path to resolution. A squad of police detectives working on a burgular case chanced to catch a serial killer at work, and in exchange for commuting his death sentence to life in prison, the man -- Raynard Waits -- has volunteered to confess to thirteen murders, including Gesto's.  Solving thirteen cases in one fell swoop would be a godsend to several police officials hoping to prosper in the upcoming elections, but they can't be sure the man is legitimate. Given his history with the case, Bosch is asked to confirm the man's story.


Like every other Bosch novel I've read, Echo Park sees Bosch following his gut and running afoul of police politics while dating an FBI agent who happens to be helping him. This time the odds are higher: if the confessor's story is legitimate, then Bosch and his partner missed a vital clue thirteen years ago, and the weight of the killer's resulting murders now sits upon their shoulders. Bosch doesn't give a damn about the political ramifications, but the thought that negligence on his part contributed to the death of twelve more young women agonizes his conscience.  That aside, something about the killer doesn't sit right with him -- and as he digs deeper, he realizes there's more afoot here than a killer pleading for leniency.  Echo Park is as much a story of politics and conspiracy as it is a murder whodunit.

As usual, Connelly's setting of Los Angeles is alive, and the neighborhood in question really exists. Its greatest strength -- besides a villain who takes his inspiration from medieval legends -- is the conflict within Bosch as he struggles with the idea that he screwed up.  Police detectives on television and in books are often portrayed as following their instincts before evidence, and usually being proven right, and the possible shakeup intrigued me. Would Connelly make Bosch face the consequences of misplaced judgment....or would he keep to the standard approach and see the detective triumph in the end?

I'd call it a 'fairly good story'. I'm lending my copy of the book to my sister to see how she'll take to Connelly and Bosch.

The Overlook

The Overlook
© 2006/2007 Michael Connelly
240 pages

In the hills above Madonna's former Hollywood Mansion, a physicist named Stanley Kent has just been found dead, neatly executed by masked men. The Hollywood detectives are only more than happy to turn the job over to the "Homicide-Special" division that takes on the bigger jobs, and Harry Bosch is their man. No sooner has he arrived at the scene of the crime and started to gauge the situation for himself, however, than does the FBI show up. Kent is authorized to handle and transport radioactive materials used by hospitals in medical treatments -- but if someone used him to steal those materials and then killed him to take care of a loose end,  it's a fair bet that the killers aren't out to open up a cancer ward in a free clinic somewhere. The FBI is concerned that Kent may have been used by terrorists to obtain materials for a 'dirty bomb', and if that's the case, the entire city of Los Angeles may be in trouble.


The national security angle brings in a host of acronymed government agencies into "Harry's case", but of course he's not impressed by the exciting and sexy world of domestic terrorism.  He's a cynic, a grizzled outsider who refuses to surrender the case completely to their hands, in part because he believes they are ignoring the torture and murder of Kent to chase radioactive materials, and thus headlines and acclaim. The only FBI agent whom he does not openly despise is Rachel Wallers,  his ally of sorts and an old flame.   I finished the book largely in one sitting, owing both to is quick pace and short length: the case is solved in about twelve hours, and the novel itself began as a serialized mystery that was 'substantially expanded' before appearing in bound form. It's still very much on the short side,  but it works as a quick read. The terrorism angle bored me at first, especially when the primary suspects were two Arab men who yelled "Allah Akbar!" before killing Kent (how stereotypical can you get?), but appearances are deceiving and there are more than few twists and turns buried inside.  The Overlook strangely mirrors the Black Echo, not only in the presence of an FBI Love Interest Lady, but in the setting (Hollywood) and in the identity of the ultimate culprit.  This was a weak point for me, but I doubt many other people have managed to read only these two books and immediately following the other. There are at least a dozen other Bosch books, and I figure it's just coincidence.  Only future reads will tell, and there will more -- because I like Bosch.

The Black Echo

The Black Echo
© 1992 Michael Connelly
375 pages

It's the week before Memorial Day 1991 in Los Angeles, the city of stars, urban street gangs, and smog -- and Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch has been called in on a Sunday to check out a possible overdose in a pipe. It's just a quick job: all he needs to do it is confirm the initial suspicions. If Harry's partner had been called to the pipe, or any other officer, that might have been the end of it -- but Harry takes his job seriously and notices the little details that others would ignore for convenience's sake. He notices the lack of tracks leading into the tunnel, the unusually pure heroin ingested by the dead man, the indications in the pattern of how his clothing is arranged that indicate he was drugged and dragged in This is no accidental overdose. This is murder.

But who would murder this man, a shiftless Vietnam veteran who has drifted from job to job in the twenty years since the end of the war? Driven by duty -- both to the badge and to a former comrade -- Harry digs in, annoying his fellow police officers who see only another broken veteran who sought release in a drug that killed him. That's not unusual for Harry, who is an excellent detective but a miserable police officer. Once he's committed to a task, he has little patience for rules or people who get in the way. Harry is a perpetual outsider who pains those who work with him,, a grizzled lone wolf, a man on a quest ---- and that quest links his case to a bank robbery in which the culprits used Los Angeles' vast system of underground flood-control tunnnels to dig inside the bank's vaults.  A year later, the FBI is still looking -- but now, they and Harry join forces. They must work quickly, because the thieves may strike again come the weekend.

This is my first time reading Michael Connelly, and I rather enjoyed the experience. I suppose the world-weary police veteran with a hidden heart of gold is a familar character,  but I like Harry.  The book unfolds through the course of a week, as Harry tries to build his case while battling charges by the grudge-holding department of Internal Affairs, who despise a curmudgeon.  There's a little romance and a lot of plot twists -- so many, in fact, that the last one doesn't emerge until after the actual crime has been taken care of.  There are subtle fragments of evidence woven throughout the book that allow the reader to put the pieces together for him- or herself, without relying on bursts of insight from Bosch.

Perfectly enjoyable book: I liked the gritty detail of it, and the intriacacy of the plot impressed me. I'll be continuing in this series as I'm able.