Michael Connelly writes with a seamless unity of tone and pace that makes reading his crime novels absolutely effortless and totally engaging. In his latest, “The Wrong Side of Goodbye,” his narrative rolls out in a perfect parade of action, memory, emotion, color and tension. The grand marshal of this pageant is Mr. Connelly’s great character Harry Bosch, and although told in the third person, the reader is firmly in Harry’s head and heart.As the story begins, Harry is looking out the window of an office on the 59th floor of the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles. “Bosch loved any opportunity to see his city from up high,” Mr. Connelly writes. But don’t be alarmed, Harry has not gone corporate since being forced to retire from the L.A.P.D.
There the ailing billionaire says to Harry: “I want you to find someone for me. Someone who might never have existed.” Excited by the challenge, Harry’s search leads to destinations all over Southern California. (If Mr. Connelly ever tires of fiction he could certainly get a job mapping the state’s freeways.)
He visits Studio City then the Los Angeles National Cemetery where soldiers are buried from the Civil War to Afghanistan: “Thousands of white marble stones in perfect rows standing as a testament to the military precision and waste of war,” Mr. Connelly writes. From the port of Oxnard to Chicano Park in San Diego to L.A.’s Arts District to his home on Woodrow Wilson Drive, Harry is convinced that he’s being tailed.
But his most poignant journey is into the past he shares with the subject of his pursuit: the Vietnam War. A long-lost footlocker packed in 1969 with books by Herman Hesse and Tolkien and cassette tapes of music by Hendrix, Cream and the Moody Blues reminds Harry of his own days as a “tunnel rat” in the Army. He recalls a Christmas Eve from that year when Bob Hope, Connie Stevens and Neil Armstrong entertained onboard the hospital ship, the U.S.S. Sanctuary, in the South China Sea. It’s one happy memory among his own trunkful of combat nightmares.
But Harry doesn’t have time to dwell on ancient history because he’s now also a reserve officer with the San Fernando Police Department. Although the town is less than three square miles, by working as a volunteer investigator he has a badge again. Following the case of a serial rapist, known as the Screen Cutter, leads not just to a riveting manhunt but also to an insightful look at workplace interactions.
Relationships have always been difficult for Harry, but he’s older now and somewhat mellowed. He gets along well with his daughter, who is in college, and is starting to reveal things to her about his past. He even trusts his “brother from another mother,” Mickey Haller, better known as the Lincoln Lawyer. The blunt and crudely funny Haller has a small but pivotal role in “The Wrong Side of Goodbye.”
Of course Harry still gets in people’s faces and then is embarrassed by his temper, and like Mr. Connelly, he is obsessive about details. He and the author also seem to share a love of work to be done. That’s good news for all Harry Bosch fans.
Margie Romero is communications manager at the Pittsburgh Public Theater.
