I just finished listening to The Black Echo (the first novel in Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series) less than a week ago. Although I didn’t think The Black Echo was that great, I decided to move forward with the Bosch books because so many people absolutely rave about them. A friend of mine is a big Harry Bosch fan, and he brought over a whole slew of Connelly books on CD for me to listen to at my leisure. That’s how I got my hands on The Black Ice, and due to the fact that I spent a lot more time in my car this past week than usual, I’m already finished with the book. Here’s my recap and review.
Plot summary (with possible spoilers): It’s Christmas, and detective Harry Bosch of the Hollywood Homicide squad is on call. He’s eating dinner alone when he picks up something unusual on the police scanner: a dead body has been found at a motel, but instead of Harry, a couple of higher-ups get called to the scene. Harry is incensed because he doesn’t like being left out of the loop, so he goes to the motel unbidden.
Once he arrives, he realizes why he didn’t get the call. The dead body is suspected to be that of Calexico Moore, a fellow police officer. Moore had been having problems, both at home and on the job, and had disappeared about a week earlier. Everyone expected that he would end up dead; they just didn’t know when.
Upon viewing the scene, Bosch and every other cop inside thinks it’s a suicide. There are no signs of struggle, no signs that a second person was ever in the room. Moore died of an apparent self-inflicted shotgun wound to the head, and just before the body is carted away to the morgue, one of the investigators finds what appears to be a suicide note in Moore’s back pocket. All that’s left to do is confirm fingerprints and dental records, and they can close the book on the suicide.
The higher-ups won’t let Bosch in on the Moore case, so instead, Harvey “98″ Pounds assigns Bosch to take over all the open murders from another cop named Porter. Porter is planning to take early retirement because of “stress” issues, and Pounds wants as many murders closed before the new year as possible in order to boost the department’s solved crimes rate.
So Bosch starts going through Porter’s file and comes across an open murder of a Juan Doe that seems solvable. After doing some preliminary background investigation, Bosch realizes that Calexico Moore was the one who discovered the dead body in the Porter case. Further digging reveals that Moore’s suicide — if that what it was — might be directly related to the Juan Doe killing.
From there, the novel details Bosch’s investigation into Calexico Moore and Juan Doe’s death. Various clues cause Harry to believe that he’s dealing with a large drug smuggling ring (the “black ice” of the title is a type of drug) and he eventually makes his way down to Mexico while following up leads. There are plenty of twists and turns during the story, as well as a big reveal near the end.
My Reaction: I found The Black Ice to be pretty similar to The Black Echo in a lot of respects. We’ve got Harry Bosch chasing down a case that other cops were ready to write off as just another suicide, we’ve got a double agent in the mix, we’ve got an underground tunnel featured as a major part of the bad guy’s plan, and we’ve got Bosch making all the right decisions and triumphing at the end.
I thought The Black Ice started out rather slowly, and it was difficult for me to really get into the story and care about what was going on. If I hadn’t been stuck in the middle of a three-hour drive, I probably would have put the CDs aside for a while or just skipped the book entirely. But as it was, I had no choice but to continue listening (or drive in silence the whole way).
Anyway, I don’t really have much else to say about this book. The story ended up being okay, but I’m getting the feeling that I’m not going to like the Harry Bosch series as much as others do. I don’t like the character yet (maybe that has more to do with the guy reading the role for the audiobooks than the way Harry is actually written) and haven’t been overly impressed with the plotting in the two books I’ve listened to.
Please tell me this series gets better as it goes along!
