Tuesday, April 10, 2012

City of Bones by Michael Connelly (2002)





 


Though the descriptions of the dead child's injuries were heartbreaking, Michael has spun quite a yarn!  I found that his relationships were not well developed, and, indeed, he seemed rather untouched by the death of a fellow police officer.  This was surprising.

"On New Year's Day, Detective Harry Bosch fields a call that a dog has found a bone--a bone that the dog's owner, a doctor, feels certain is a human bone.







Bosch investigates, and that chance discovery leads him to a shallow grave in the Hollywood hills, evidence of a murder committed more than twenty years earlier. It's a cold case, but it stirs up Bosch's memories of his own childhood as an orphan in the city. He can't let it go. Digging through police reports and hospital records, tracking down street kids and runaways from the 1970s, Bosch finds a family ripped apart by an absence--and a trail, ever more tenuous, into a violent, terrifying world.






As the case takes Bosch deeper into the past, a rookie cop named Julia Brasher brings him alive in the present in a way no one has in years. Bosch has been warned about the trouble that comes with dating a rookie, but no warning could withstand the heat between them--or prepare Bosch for the explosions when the case takes a hard turn. A suspect bolts, a cop is shot, and suddenly Bosch's cold case has all of L.A. in an uproar--and Bosch fighting to keep control in a lawless and brutal showdown.






Drawing on the "precision-tooled twists" and "wellspring of authentically lurid detail" (Los Angeles magazine) that have made him one of the fastest-selling novelists at work today, Michael Connelly has written a riveting, hard-edged, and unforgettable thriller, proof that he is among "the most talented of crime writers" (with thanks from The New Yorker)