Two Mavericks
Michael
Connelly has created series with two memorable characters, an LAPD cop
Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch and his half brother Mickey Haller, a maverick lawyer.
Sometimes their paths cross, like in the best-selling author’s new book, The Crossing.
Bosch is a
brilliant investigator, even if his methods are unorthodox, for which he is
disliked by his senior. Haller has rubbed so many people the wrong way, that he
functions out of his car, a Lincoln. Connelly’s thriller titled The Lincoln Lawyer was also turned into
a movie starring Matthew McConaughey, a fact that is alluded to in The Crossing. Bosch is also the hero of
a TV series starring Titus Welliver, which is not mentioned.
Anyway,
Bosch has been suspended, or rather, forced to retire due to events that took
place in the last book, The Burning Room.
He is fighting a case against the Los Angeles Police Department and that has
not endeared him to his former colleagues.
Bosch finds himself at a loose end when Haller offers him the job of
investigating one of his clients, a reformed gangster called Da’Quan Foster.
The man has
been accused of a particularly savage rape and murder and his DNA found on the
crime scene. But he insists that he is innocent and Haller believes him. If Bosch
takes the case, it would mean standing up against the LAPD and be considered a
traitor. As he says to Haller, “You know what they call a guy who switches
sides in homicide? They call him a Jane Fonda, as in hanging with the North
Vietnamese. You get it? It’s crossing to the dark side.’ ”
But
curiosity and force of habit make him look at the Foster’s file and he can see
that the investigation left a lot of loose ends. Against his better judgment he
takes on the case and unravels its complicated strands. It takes him to the
sleazy side of LA as he keeps a step ahead of the goons who dog his every step.
Connelly
gives a hint about who is involved right at the start, but it takes a cop with
the intelligence and unerring instinct to pick up a small point and blow the
work of the police detectives to bits.
While the pace and the suspense are kept up, Bosch also takes time to
listen to jazz, tinker with a vintage Harley, interact with his truculent
daughter Maddie. He also takes the help of Lucia ‘Lucy’ Soto, his former
partner, and ponders the possibility of an autumn romance.
Never mind
the boring title, The Crossing is a
terrific thriller—Connelly at his best
The Crossing
By Michael
Connelly
Publisher: Little,
Brown
Pages: 388
********************
Anyone who
reads The Crossing would want to go
back and check out The Burning Room too,
if they haven’t already. This is where
some of the groundwork for the later book is laid.
It is in
this novel that Bosch teams up with young Lucia Soto, a tireless hardworking
cop with her own dark past to deal with. Two cases collide as Bosch and Soto,
assigned to the Open-Unsolved Unit, try to solve a decade old shooting incident
in which a mariachi guitarist, Orlando Merced, was shot; this incident connects
in a very convoluted way to a fire, also in the past, in which kids in an
unauthorized daycare centre were killed. Lucia was one the kids there who
survived, and she cannot rest until she finds who was responsible for that horrible act of arson.
Connelly
construct an elaborate scenario, in which complicated forensics, politics,
corruption, illicit romance and the squalid world of migrants are wrapped in.
The two cases are solved, still, for his painstaking work, Bosch is kicked out
of the force.
But then he
ponders about how things are not the same… “because the Department was more and
more becoming a desk-bound institution. . . . Detectives sat in twelve-hundred
dollar chairs and wore sleek designer shoes with tassels. Gone were the days of
thick rubber soles and function over form, when a detective’s motto was ‘Get
off your ass and go knock on doors.’ ”
Bosch and
Soto do exactly that and makes for a very satisfying read for thriller fans.
The Burning Room
By Michael
Connelly
Publisher:
Little, Brown and Company
Pages: 388
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