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| Love everything he has written. Keep them coming. |
After three years on the crime beat in L.A., Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published in 1992 and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Connelly followed up with three more Bosch books, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote, before publishing The Poet in 1996—a thriller with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist. In 1997, he went back to Bosch with Trunk Music, and in 1998 another non-series thriller, Blood Work, was published. It was inspired in part by a friend’s receiving a heart transplant and the attendant “survivor’s guilt” the friend experienced, knowing that someone died in order that he have the chance to live. Connelly had been interested and fascinated by those same feelings as expressed by the survivors of the plane crash he wrote about years before. The movie adaptation of Blood Work was released in 2002, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood."Lost Light"
“Award-winning former crime reporter Connelly hits all the right notes with this latest in his Edgar-winning mystery series featuring sax-playing L.A. detective Harry Bosch. …This exciting procedural is as good as any in the series, and Connelly’s concluding coda has a kicker about Harry’s private life that will draw gasps of astonishment from longtime readers.”
— Publishers Weekly
"The Closers" (2005)
After three years out of the LAPD, Harry Bosch returns, to find the department a different place from the one he left.
A new Police Chief has been brought over from New York to give the place a thorough clean up from top to bottom. Working with his former partner, Kiz Rider, Harry is assigned to the department’s Open-Unsolved Unit, working on the thousands of cold cases that haunt the LAPD’s files.
These detectives are the Closers — they put a shovel in the dirt and turn over the past. By applying new techniques to old evidence they aim to unearth some hidden killers and bring them to justice, for “a city that forgets its murder victims is a city lost.”
I loved this book; the ending was super and came as a surprise although I suppose it was lurking in the background about midway through the book.
Mickey Haller has spent all his professional life afraid that he wouldn’t recognize innocence if it stood right in front of him. But what he should have been on the watch for was evil. Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. Bikers, con artists, drunk drivers, drug dealers — they’re all on Mickey Haller’s client list. For him, the law is rarely about guilt or innocence — it’s about negotiation and manipulation. Sometimes it’s even about justice.
"The Drop"
Harry Bosch has been given three years before he must retire from the LAPD, and he wants cases more fiercely than ever. In one morning, he gets two.
DNA from a 1989 rape and murder matches a 29-year-old convicted rapist. Was he an eight-year-old killer or has something gone terribly wrong in the new Regional Crime Lab? The latter possibility could compromise all of the lab’s DNA cases currently in court. Then Bosch and his partner are called to a death scene fraught with internal politics. Councilman Irvin Irving’s son jumped or was pushed from a window at the Chateau Marmont.
Irving, Bosch’s longtime nemesis, has demanded that Harry handle the investigation. Relentlessly pursuing both cases, Bosch makes two chilling discoveries: a killer operating unknown in the city for as many as three decades, and a political conspiracy that goes back into the dark history of the police department.
"The Fifth Witness"
In tough times, crime is one of the few things that still pays, but if defense attorney Mickey Haller was expecting an uptick in business during the economic downturn, the reality is a different story. Even people needing legal representation to keep them out of jail are having to make cutbacks, it seems. In fact, the most significant part of Mickey’s business right now is not about keeping clients out of jail but about keeping a roof over their heads, as the foreclosure boom hits thousands of people who were granted unrealistic mortgages in the good times and now face being kicked to the curb in the bad times.
Lisa Trammel has been a client of Mickey’s for eight months — his very first foreclosure case, in fact — and although so far he’s managed to stop the bank from taking her house, the strain and sense of injustice have taken a toll. The bank recently got a restraining order to prevent her from protesting against their practices. Now, a high level bank employee, Mitchell Bondurant, has been found dead in the bank’s parking lot and Lisa is about to be indicted for murder.
For Mickey, it’s back to what he does best on the biggest stage of all, but if he thought defending Lisa Trammel was going to be a walk in the park, he’d be wrong. Not only is he about to learn some startling truths about his client, but also about himself, and by the time the verdict is in, Mickey’s whole world will have been
turned upside down.
Back on the job after an involuntary leave of absence, LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch lands his first case: a Hollywood producer found in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce, shot twice in the head. It looks like “trunk music,” a Mafia hit. The LAPD’s organized crime unit is oddly uninterested, but Harry thinks they’re wrong. He follows the money trail from the producer’s office to Las Vegas, where he quickly finds evidence of Mafia involvement. But something about the case doesn’t add up, and Harry follows a string of odd clues — glitter in the producer’s cuffs, an over-the-counter medication in the Rolls’ glove box — in a different direction entirely.
Just when Harry thinks he’s on firm ground, the bottom falls out. Blind sided again and again, at odds with his superiors, and overwhelmed by a romance that has cropped up in the middle of the case, Harry is as off balance as he’s ever been. When the picture finally comes into focus, Harry discovers a scheme many magnitudes more deadly than he imagined—with himself now one of its targets. Running on instincts and nerves, with a short fuse and everything to lose, Harry must prove himself not just by breaking the case, but by surviving it.
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| Pacific Dining Car |
Things are finally looking up for defense attorney Mickey Haller. After two years of wrong turns, Haller is ready to go back to the courtroom. When Hollywood lawyer Jerry Vincent is murdered, Haller inherits his biggest case yet: the defense of Walter Elliott, a prominent studio executive accused of murdering his wife and her lover. But as Haller prepares for the case that could launch him into the big time, he learns that Vincent’s killer may be coming for him next.
Enter LAPD Detective Harry Bosch. Determined to find Vincent’s killer, he is not opposed to using Haller as bait. But as danger mounts and the stakes rise, these two loners realize their only choice is to work together.
"The Black Box"
In a case that spans 20 years, Harry Bosch links the bullet from a recent crime to a file from 1992, the killing of a young female photojournalist during the L.A. riots. Harry originally investigated the murder, but it was then handed off to the Riot Crimes Task Force and never solved.
Now Bosch’s ballistics match indicates that her death was not random violence, but something more personal, and connected to a deeper intrigue. Like an investigator combing through the wreckage after a plane crash, Bosch searches for the “black box,” the one piece of evidence that will pull the case together. Riveting and relentlessly paced,
The Black Box leads Harry Bosch into one of his most fraught and perilous cases.
"The Concrete Blonde"
They called him the Dollmaker…
The serial killer who stalked Los Angeles and left a grisly calling card on the faces of his female victims. With a single faultless shot, Detective Harry Bosch thought he had ended the city’s nightmare. Now, the dead man’s widow is suing Harry and the LAPD for killing the wrong man — an accusation that rings terrifyingly true when a new victim is discovered with the Dollmaker’s macabre signature.
For the second time, Harry must hunt down a death-dealer who is very much alive, before he strikes again. It’s a blood-tracked quest that will take Harry from the hard edges of the L.A. night to the last place he ever wanted to go — the darkness of his own heart.
With The Concrete Blonde, Edgar Award-winning author Michael Connelly has hit a whole new level in his career, creating a breathtaking thriller that thrusts you into a blistering courtroom battle — and a desperate search for a sadistic killer.
"Blood Work"
Harry Boxch's daughter gave him recordings by one of his favorite jazz artists, Art Pepper, on his birthday in a scene from "The Black Box"
In "Blood Work," Michael 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.
"Blood Work" won the Grand Prix, the highest honor for a mystery novel in France. It also won the Anthony Award and Macavity Award for Best Novel of 1998. "Blood Work" was released as a major motion picture by Warner Bros Studios, directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.
Now Bosch’s ballistics match indicates that her death was not random violence, but something more personal, and connected to a deeper intrigue. Like an investigator combing through the wreckage after a plane crash, Bosch searches for the “black box,” the one piece of evidence that will pull the case together. Riveting and relentlessly paced,
The Black Box leads Harry Bosch into one of his most fraught and perilous cases.
"Chasing the Dime"
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.
"The Black Ice"
The official report said suicide. But in a city where murder is sport, Bosch isn’t ready to blame the victim. Narcotics officer Cal Moore’s orders were to look into the city’s latest drug killing. Instead, he ends up in a motel room with his head in several pieces and a suicide note stuffed in his back pocket. Years ago,
Harry learned the first rule of the good cop: don’t look for the facts, but the glue that holds them together. Now, Harry’s making some very dangerous connections, starting with one dead cop and leading to a bloody string of murders that wind from Hollywood Boulevard’s drug bazaar to the dusty back alleys south of the border and into the center of a complex and lethal game — one in which Harry is the next and likeliest victim. After his richly acclaimed debut,
Michael Connelly brings Bosch back in an achievement even more stunning and suspenseful than its predecessor — a time-bomb of a novel supercharged with tension and non-stop action that doesn’t let up until the final, explosive ending.
"The Gods of Guilt"
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In the tradition,
this book kept
me interested,
and I finished it
in two days.
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Mickey Haller gets the text, “Call me ASAP — 187,” and the California penal code for murder immediately gets his attention. Murder cases have the highest stakes and the biggest paydays, and they always mean Haller has to be at the top of his game.
When Mickey learns that the victim was his own former client, a prostitute he thought he had rescued and put on the straight and narrow path, he knows he is on the hook for this one. He soon finds out that she was back in LA and back in the life. Far from saving her, Mickey may have been the one who put her in danger.
Haunted by the ghosts of his past, Mickey must work tirelessly and bring all his skill to bear on a case that could mean his ultimate redemption or proof of his ultimate guilt.
