"CITY OF BONES" by Michael Connelly
[ Little, Brown and Company @ $36.95 Can]
A BOOK REVIEW BY ALEX GRANT.

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At the time I reviewed LOST LIGHT the tenth ‘Harry Bosch’ thriller by Michael Connelly, which is due out in April, I had not read his ninth novel in the series - CITY OF BONES which is still in hard-covers – it was published in October, 2002.

In CITY OF BONES Bosch is still a top-notch investigative supervisor with the LAPD. A man whose tenacity and integrity endlessly aggravates his superiors and his peers. As relentless, and as’ sensitive’ as ever, he is in charge of a missing-child case that goes back a score of years. The dead boy, a pre-adolescent runaway, may have been the victim of vicious and prolonged physical abuse. Bosch, himself an emotionally scarred orphan, takes the case very personally, as is his wont when any truly grave injustice has been perpetrated on his beat.

Harry takes time out from his punishing schedule to form an amorous alliance with rookie cop Julia Brasher, a former lawyer in her thirties, though she is considerably younger than Bosch. Julia is a fine match for his suspicious and immensely curious nature, and the author describes this love affair with great skill and affection.

Cleverly employing the La Brea Tar Pits - a beloved tourist site where a pair of murdered women’s bones from 9000 years ago were unearthed - author Connelly draws ingenious parallels between the distant past and the present-day. A dedicated forensic anthropologist Dr.William Golliher serves as Harry’s guide to this remote past. Swiftly CITY OF BONES becomes a book akin to those of Ross MacDonald, deeply anchored in the California past.

Connelly’s writing is in the direct tradition of Jack Webb’s DRAGNET radio and tv series that stuck to the facts and laid them out for us in fascinating order. He is able to vividly detail every step in a police investigation without becoming banal or pedestrian, largely because Harry Bosch is a crusader on a mission "to take evil out of his world". Bosch is also a realist, hard-nosed and pragmatic, who knows that he is "wading in the dark water of the abyss with two leaking buckets in his hands". Connelly, to his eternal credit, seldom gets more flowery than that.

CITY OF BONES of course also brings Los Angeles vividly to life, something of a Connelly forte, and one of the principal reasons he has earned an immense following among mystery readers. Certainly this 9th Bosch police-procedural is one of Connelly’s finest books.

© Alex Grant March 2003

'Lost Light'
Alex Grant reviews the new crime novel by Michael Connelley

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