I’ve now listened to or read 12 of Michael Connelly’s published works, and I have to admit that with each novel I complete, I start enjoying the series more and more. I’m still not convinced that detective Harry Bosch is a great or believable character, or that the novels feature airtight plots full of gripping suspense and mystery, as some diehard fans would have you believe. However, they are becoming increasingly entertaining for me — and that’s what’s important here.

My latest foray into Connelly’s world entailed reading the 2001 release A Darkness More Than Night. This is considered part of the Harry Bosch series, but the main character is actually Terry McCaleb, who first made an appearance in 1998’s Blood Work. While Darkness wasn’t exactly a page-turner, the familiar characters made it comfortable, enjoyable reading.

Plot summary (with possible spoilers): A Darkness More Than Night follows two distinct storylines for about half of the book before a connection is finally revealed that brings all of the action and characters together.

One storyline involves LAPD detective Harry Bosch of the Hollywood division. Bosch is the star witness in the David Storey murder trial, which promises to be the biggest media circus since O.J. Simpson. Storey, a film director with some commercial success, is accused of murdering a young woman and then staging the scene to make it look like an accidental death due to autoerotic asphyxiation. There isn’t any hard evidence pointing at Storey; just a bunch of coincidences leading back to him. But he did brag about the killing to Bosch when they were alone at one point, so Bosch is making it his personal mission to help the prosecutors trip Storey up and put him behind bars.

The other storyline involves the murder of a man named Edward Gunn. Gunn was suspected of killing a prostitute a few years before, but again, Bosch, who also investigated that case, couldn’t come up with enough evidence to pin the crime on him. Now, Gunn was found murdered in his apartment, with his body elaborately bound and staged — making it appear to be the work of a serial killer. The case falls into the lap of sheriff Jaye Winston, but since she’s not getting anywhere with it, she asks former FBI profiler Terry McCaleb to help her.

As the novel progresses, we see that the Gunn crime scene was a replica of a painting by Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch — Harry’s namesake. The more McCaleb studies the Gunn scene, the more his profile of a possible suspect starts to take shape… until he reveals that Harry Bosch is a very likely candidate for the killing.

From this point forward, the novel deals with McCaleb’s investigation of Bosch, as well as Bosch’s attempts to clear his name and follow through on his original goal of putting Storey away for good.

My Reaction: I thought A Darkness More Than Night was a pretty decent book, but as with a few other Connelly novels that I’ve read, the “twists” were telegraphed well in advance, thereby taking away any sense of suspense or surprise. For instance, the reader could see that McCaleb was going to peg Harry as a possible suspect in the Gunn murder about 30 pages before McCaleb finally came to that conclusion.

That’s an incredibly long time to sit there waiting for the main character to catch up, and of course those intervening pages were incredibly boring because Connelly felt the need to spell out every little detail that led McCaleb to the inevitable conclusion.

Moreover, another problem with this particular twist (Harry as suspect) is that I never for one second believed that Harry actually was the killer, and I doubt that other readers fell for that angle. As a result, I was only half paying attention to the storyline and only perked up my interest again after McCaleb realized his mistake.

Other than that, however, I liked A Darkness More Than Night. I enjoyed getting a bunch of old characters back again (Graciela, Raymond, Winston, Buddy, etc.) and liked seeing how their lives had changed over the years. Now if Bosch and McCaleb had been working together to profile and catch a serial killer, that would have made for a great novel. But Bosch as a suspect? No way! Even so, this book is still worth checking out.