Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #651656 in Books
• Published on: 2002-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 496 pages

Customer Reviews

A Triple Noir Introduction to a Great Detective Series

How dark can you make a police procedural? Michael Connelly pushes the familiar noir envelope into new dimensions in this dark-as-night-at-the-bottom-of-the-sea story. I call it a triple noir mystery because detective Hieronymus (rhymes with anonymous) Bosch

1. comes from a horrible family background (his mother was a woman who rented by the hour and was murdered, leaving Harry to the foster care system),

2. lived a nightmare as a tunnel-rat fighter in the Vietnamese War, and

3. this investigation has enough darkness in it to put out a search light.

The book's title is a reference back to tunnel fighting.

Most new detective series begin with a character who is breaking in. During the subsequent books, the detective gradually develops skill and a career.

Connelly does something different: Bosch is a virtually burned-out case who lives only to bring down the bad guys (be they in LAPD or outside). He's beyond the classic rebel without a cause (James Dean would have been frightened of our Harry). This story picks up on Harry after he's well along on a slide in losing control over his anger.

It's the weekend and Harry's partner is out selling real estate. Harry covers what appears to be an OD by an addict until things don't add up. Pushing forward, Harry convinces himself it's a murder. No one is happy about it. But life is proceeding until Harry checks in with the FBI to find out about a bank robbery that seems connected. Harry feels like he's stepped into something he shouldn't, but the icy FBI agent, Eleanor Wish, attracts his interest anyway. Soon, the LAPD Internal Affairs team is after Harry. Can he brazen it out and keep his investigation?

This story has more surprises in it than you would expect. Harry also goes off like a Roman candle at the slightest provocation. His "payback" often reminds me of "Dirty Harry." Some of them are pretty funny, but all are powerful. You'll be cheering.

You'll know something funny is going on in the investigation, but you won't be ahead of Harry in figuring it out. Black Echo makes for a more interesting, adventure-laden story that way.

Very nice!

Start here and work through the novels in the order they were written. You have some amazing treats ahead of you.

This is where greatness began
As of the date of this review, Michael Connelly has written and published eighteen fictional novels of which thirteen feature LAPD Detective Harry Bosch. It all began back in 1992 with The Black Echo but if, like many, you have discovered Connelly by way of his more recent stories, then do not for one minute think that back then he was just a beginner learning his trade and his debut novel should be considered with caution. No, quite simply if you like Connelly today then you will like Connelly `then' just as much.

This is despite the fact that it's a tale of events in the early 1990s with heavy references to events of the early 1970s. More specifically, Bosch is a Los Angeles detective turning 40 with powerful memories of his experiences as a tunnel rat in Vietnam some twenty years earlier and from which the title of this novel draws its name. But the drawing of the characters and their relationships with one another is of high quality, a skill which, in my humble opinion, only a minority of Connelly's peers in the field of crime thrillers pull off as successfully as he does. In any thriller series this is the element that probably defines success or failure more than any other, and since Connelly has been writing tales surrounding Bosch for over fifteen years, it's safe to assume that he's cracked this difficult task and he demonstrates this from the word go in his debut novel.

Having already read the outstanding Concrete Blonde (the third in the Bosch series) it's sometimes amusing to read the occasional mentions of the career-defining experiences of the case built around the pursuit of the Dollmaker; amusing because Connelly decided never to write the story itself, yet the events of that case are cleverly used to help shape our understanding of Bosch's personality in small doses in The Black Echo and I am sure that he always planned to build a story around it for The Concrete Blonde two years later. To me that says much about the forward-thinking, the creativity and the plain confidence of the author.

It's easy to summarise this story's plot - the body of a man is found and Bosch, by chance, is assigned to the case to find the man's killer or killers. It's not long before Bosch brings about an association with the dead man (a Vietnam tunnel rat who worked with Bosch two decades earlier) to an audacious bank robbery the previous summer and a similar heist that is planned for the imminent future. Bosch has it all figured out, and has to solve all this is in the midst of an Internal Affairs investigation coupled with high-level corruption among those who might have a vested interest in the two bank robberies. The story covers about one week, my one criticism being the absence of any chapters and the use, instead, of rather long `parts' which for people like myself who often read books in snatches of thirty minutes at a time, can be slightly irritating. Anyone who invests lengthy periods of time to reading won't mind at all, I'm sure.

All I can say as a lover of crime fiction and a fan of good series creators such as Val McDermid, John Connolly, Mo Hayder and Mark Billingham (and the owner of pretty much everything written by Deaver, Cornwell, Slaughter, Reichs, Gerritsen, Coben, Rankin and Child), is that Michael Connelly is surely and deservedly right up there with the best of them and this debut novel is a must-read for anyone who has read and enjoyed his more recent work. It's real quality.

Superb
I read this book on the recommendation of a friend and was not disappointed. It starts off a little slow but stick with it, it gets better and better. I now look forward to reading the rest of the Harry Bosch books.