Tag Archives: Michael Connelly

This Harry Bosch thriller starts with an investigation into the murder of a Chinese convenience store owner. It happens that this very man gave shelter to Harry in his shop during a riot, so he resolves to do everything he can to track down the culprit. During the investigation, the author answers a lingering question – how did Harry suddenly find himself looking after his teenage daughter, in later books in the series? The daughter, Madeline, was living with her mother Eleanor Wish in Hong Kong – they become an integral part of this story when a Triad gang decide to ward off Harry’s murder investigation by kidnapping Maddie.

The book has plenty of plot twists to keep the reader’s interest, but I found it too far-fetched. Identify the location of the kidnapping from a fleeting, blurred view out of the window in the ransom video? Find Maddie in the middle of Hong Kong, a city Bosch hardly knows, given just 24 hours? No problem, and why not leave a trail of destruction behind when Bosch catches a flight home with Maddie? A nice touch is when another of the author’s characters, lawyer Micky Haller, steps in to defend Bosch from any awkward charges from the Hong Kong police.

This is another in the Harry Bosch series. He teams up with a rookie detective Lucia Soto to investigate the death of a mariachi band member (who succumbed to complications from being shot ten years earlier). We later discover that Soto has connections to the area and a background investigation runs in parallel into a horrific fire that killed a number of children (and from which Soto escaped).

This is another Harry Bosch thriller by Michael Connelly. This one is set at a period of time when Harry is married to Eleanor, but the marriage is in trouble. A bad time, then, to be assigned to a highly sensitive case which could trigger riots in the discontented city if handled injudiciously.

Bosch has to handle inter-departmental politics and work with a team headed by Chasten, his sworn enemy who has investigated his own conduct in the past. The case centres on the death of Elias, a celebrity lawyer known for taking, and usually winning, cases against the LAPD.

Harry is assisted by Kizmin Rider and Jerry Edgar, but has to watch out for a high-level leak from within the case. It’s a good read, though the background case of a murdered young girl is rather harrowing.

In The Drop, Harry Bosch is working for the cold cases department and suddenly finds he is called on to investigate two cases at once. The first is an apparent suicide of the son of a leading politician – with all the accompanying fallout dealing with a long-term enemy of the police force could bring. The other is a puzzling murder in which the suspect matching DNA from the scene would have been a child at the time of the crime. In this book, Harry meets Hannah Stone, the therapist of one of the suspects. It also features his daughter, Maddie.

This is another book in the Harry Bosch series from Michael Connelly. There are strong connections to another book in this series, The Dollmaker, so best to read that first. I particularly liked that we followed two story lines, the first being a court case with Harry Bosch unusally appearing as the defendant, the second being a new investigation into a murder. On the personal level, we found out some more about Harry’s relationship with Sylvia – but, strangely, no mention of Harry’s daughter at all (in other books, she lives with him and is quite significant in the story).

This is another Harry Bosch novel from Michael Connelly. I liked some of the back story where Bosch duels with his new statistics-led boss and has to get creative in order to continue with the investigations that matter to him. I found the main plot rather tenuous and didn’t buy into it – not one of Connelly’s best.