With the holidays behind us, and the weather getting a bit foreboding, I have been able to knock off three books thus far in 2016.
This one came as a recommendation from high school classmate and Facebook friend Jack Longmore. No, this is not, as the title might imply, a book about strained race relations. The "whites" in the title refer to unsolved cases that confront several police detectives in New York City. Such cases are the "white whales" that each cop continues to pursue in Ahab-like fashion over the course of their careers.
This is a pretty gritty story of cops on the night shift. I am guessing that the author is trying to fashion himself as a latter day Joseph Wambaugh, and in that regard, he falls a little short. There were a lot of characters and overlapping story lines in this one that made it difficult to get into, but if you are able to stay with it past the half-way mark, it is a pretty good story.
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"The Crossing" is the latest in the Connelly's series about Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch, and in this one, Connelly brings in his other series character, Mickey Haller, the "Lincoln Lawyer", into the story. Turns out that Bosch and Haller are half-brothers, a fact I missed somewhere along the way.
I have read a number of these stories, and always liked them, but I fear that Harry Bosch has jumped the shark. In this one, Harry is now "retired" from the LAPD, and looking for things to do when Mickey asks him to work on investigating circumstances surrounding a murder, the suspect charged with the crime being Haller's client. After a lifetime of chasing down and arresting killers, Harry is reluctant to make the "crossing" to the other side and try to free an accused killer. Harry's angst over the whole thing takes up a large part of the story, and gets a bit tiresome, but he takes it on anyway, and ultimately finds the truth behind a shocking crime among the upper crust in LA.
As I say, I think I'm pretty much done with Harry, and I'm thinking that Connelly would be better off writing solely about Mickey going forward.
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This is a book that was one of those Kindle "Deal of the Day" books that Amazon sends out all the time, and I am glad that I spent the $2.99 on it.
The story involves the murder of a beautiful young heiress in Portland, Maine in 2012 that is eerily similar to the murder of her great-great-grandmother in the same Maine location in 1904. The featured characters are Portland police detectives Michael McCabe and Maggie Savage, and it turns out that "The Girl in the Glass" is the fourth book in a series featuring these two.
This one offers a very good, believable whodunit, and McCabe and Savage look to be good characters to follow in a series. Once I got into it, I knocked this one off in two days. I will certainly be checking into the first three novels in the series, and you should, too.
There are few better police / detective novelists out there than Michael Connelly. His novels featuring LA police detective Harry Bosch are among the best of the genre. I just finished reading the latest, "The Black Box", and it is par for the course.
Harry, now working Open and Unsolved cases, stumbles upon one that is personal for him. A foreign journalist, was killed in 1992 during the riots in Los Angeles following the Rodney King verdicts. Harry was the homicide detective who was called to the scene at the time, but the case was never solved. Now, the cold case file has fallen on Harry's desk and he won't stop until it's solved.
It's a good story, to be sure, but I do have one beef with the Bosch series. When you read one or two of these books, they stand well on their own, but when you read a lot of them, and I've probably read a dozen or so of them over the years, you start to get tired of the way Harry is constantly butting heads with his superiors. They always seem to have something in for Harry, and he never, and I mean never, follows procedures and orders. He always has to do things his way, and he always seems to be under investigation by Internal Affairs, and he always to be just this close to being suspended, fired, or even arrested.
I get tired of that.
