Michael Connelly has been attracting
fans by the droves with his hard-boiled, edgy thrillers. A former crime
reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Connelly combines a poet's ear for
language with a deep understanding of the criminal mind to create dark,
dramatic stories that raise the thriller genre to a new level. Connelly's
Hieronymus Bosch distinguishes himself from other L.A. detectives, private
or otherwise, in that he captures the angst of loneliness that each
of us can feel, even living in Paradise. Standing in the middle of a
crowded city plaza, arms full of excess baggage, and being so to-the-bone
weary of having a totally fucked-up life in the City of Angels, Harry
Bosch is always alone.
The Black Echo
A meticulously plotted, totally
engrossing first novel introduces a major new talent to crime writing.
An L.A.P.D. detective who had confronted the black echo--the sound of
the most naked fear--in the underground passages of Vietnam finds a
connection between that horrific time and the robbery of a safety-deposit
vault through a complex tunnel system beneath the bank.
Maverick
LAPD detective and Vietnam vet Harry Bosch returns in a novel even more
riveting than his thrilling debut The Black Echo. When a missing narcotics
officer is found dead, Bosch uncovers a plot more baffling and dangerous
than he could have imagined.
"Would you risk
your life for a woman you'd never met?
"Henry Pierce
has a whole new life — new apartment, new telephone, new telephone
number. But the first time he checks his messages, he discovers that someone
had the number before him. The messages on his line are for a woman named
Lilly, and she is in some kind of serious trouble. Pierce is inexorably
drawn into Lilly's world, and it's unlike any world he's ever known. It
is a nighttime world of escort services, websites, sex, and secret identities.
Pierce tumbles through a hole, abandoning his orderly life in a frantic
race to save the life of a woman he has never met.
"Pierce's skills
as a computer entrepreneur allow him to trace Lilly's last days with some
precision. But every step into Lilly's past takes Pierce deeper into a
web of inescapable intricacy — and a decision that could cost him
everything he owns and holds dear." (2002)
"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.
"The investigation
races to a shocking conclusion and leaves Bosch on the brink of an unimaginable
decision — one that will leave readers hungrily awaiting for the
next Bosch novel." (2002)
Edgar
Award-winning Michael Connelly delivers a supercharged thriller. Four
years ago, LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch shot the notorious serial
killer "The Dollmaker." Now Harry is accused of killing the wrong man--just
as a new body turns up that has all the hallmarks of a Dollmaker slaying.
To clear his name, Harry searches for a copycat killer.
"Harry
Bosch is up to his neck in a case that has transfixed all of celebrity-mad
Los Angeles: a movie director is charged with murdering an actress during
sex, and then staging her death to make it look like a suicide.
Bosch is both the arresting officer and the star witness in a trial
that has brought the Hollywood media pack out in full-throated frenzy.
"Meanwhile,
Terry McCaleb is enjoying an idyllic retirement on Catalina Island when
a visit from an old colleague brings his former world rushing back.
It's a murder, the unreadable kind of murder he specialized in solving
back in his FBI days. The investigation has stalled, and the sheriff's
office is asking McCaleb to take a quick look at the murder book to
see if he turns up something they've missed.
"McCaleb's
first reading of the crime scene leads him to look for a methodical
killer with a taste for rituals and revenge. As his quick look
accelerates into a full-sprint investigation, the two crimes —
his murdered loner and Bosch's movie director — begin to overlap
strangely. With one unsettling revelation after another, they
merge, becoming one impossible, terrifying case, involving almost inconceivable
calculation. McCaleb believes he has unmasked the most frightening
killer ever to cross his sights. But his investigation tangles
with Bosch's lines, and the two men find themselves at odds in the most
dangerous investigation of their lives." (2001)
L.A.P.D.
detective Harry Bosch's personal and financial life is crumbling as he
continues his three-decade search for his mother's murderer, but things
really heat up when evidence begins to surface and his own life is threatened
by someone very powerful, cunning, and deadly.
When
the body of a Hollywood producer, the apparent victim of a mafia hit,
is found in the trunk of a Rolls-Royce, maverick LAPD homicide detective
Harry Bosch follows a complex trail of gambling debts to Las Vegas, in
a case that suddenly becomes personal.
In
L.A., a famous African-American lawyer has been found murdered on the
eve of a high-profile trial. Because the attorney rose to fame prosecuting
cases that alleged police brutality and racism by the LAPD, the list of
suspects includes half of the police force. Harry Bosch is chosen to head
the investigation, a politically explosive affair that will take him to
the ugliest corners of law enforcement. To make matters worse, Bosch's
wife, a compulsive gambler, is missing. It's a delicate situation on all
fronts--and an entire city holds its breath waiting for Bosch to solve
the crime.
In Blood Work, Connelly introduces
a new character, Terry McCaleb, who was a top man at the FBI until a heart
ailment forced his early retirement. Now he lives a quiet life, nursing
his new heart and restoring the boat on which he lives in Los Angeles
Harbor. Although he isn't looking for any excitement, when Graciela Rivers
asks him to investigate her sister Gloria's death, her story hooks him
immediately: the new heart beating in McCaleb's chest is Gloria's. As
McCaleb investigates the evidence in the case, the suspected randomness
of the crime gives way to an unsettling suspicion of a twisted intelligence
behind the murder. Soon McCaleb finds himself on the trail of a killer
more horrifying than anything he ever encountered before.
