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Lost Light
by Michael Connelly
Review by David White
 I've been
saying since Angel's Flight that Michael Connelly
is the best author writing today. He's willing to shake up his
series character, LAPD detective Harry
Bosch, and allow us to see him in different ways. In A
Darkness More Than Night, we got to see Harry from the perspective
of Terry McCaleb, Connelly's
other series character, who's investigating Harry who was charged
with murder. And, most shocking, at the end of the last Bosch
novel, City of Bones, Bosch was so fed up with
the red tape of the LAPD, that Connelly allowed Bosch to hand
in his resignation. However, Connelly wasn't ending the Bosch
series; he was only allowing us to see a different angle of Bosch.
Recalling the opening of Raymond Chandler's The
Big Sleep, Bosch shows up at a rich movie executive's
home in his best suit. He has gone to ask about a woman who
was murdered when Bosch was still on the police force. You see,
when Bosch retired, he took his unsolved case files with him,
and some of the untouched cases still haunt him.
The woman Bosch is asking about was killed at the
movie exec's studio and the case was eventually overlooked, when
an armored truck delivering two million dollars as a movie prop
was hijacked. But Bosch never forgets, and after asking around,
he gets warnings from some of his old co-workers, namely Kiz
Rider, who asks him to stay out of the case.
Writing in the first person for the first time,
Connelly finally gets us inside Bosch's head. Unfortunately,
the first third of the novel's prose feels very heavy-handed.
Bosch's ruminates about his "mission" to the point
of almost being tedious.
"For the longest time I believed the two
[the badge and mission] were inextricably entwined. I could
not have one without the other. But over the weeks and months
came the realization that one identity was greater, that it superseded
the other. My mission remained intact. My job in the world,
badge or no badge, was to stand for the dead."
Please! Somehow, when reading Bosch in the third
person, his "mission" didn't seem so overbearing, but
now, hearing him talk about it at every moment, it gets annoying.
The reader and Connelly both seem to need to adjust to the new
writing perspective, much as Bosch is adjusting to being retired.
As Bosch begins to sift through the murder, the
FBI, a paraplegic ex-cop, productions studios, his former wife,
and Hollywood clubs become involved. When one of the marked
dollar bills from the robbery turns up with a suspected terrorist,
Bosch becomes entangled with the newly created Homeland Security
division of the FBI. This is where Connelly begins to shine.
He ratchets up the suspense as Bosch becomes more and more involved
with the Feds, who are trying to keep him off the case. But
in true private investigator tradition, Bosch only becomes more
stubbornly determined to solve the case.
Once Connelly gets past writing about Bosch's mission,
the novel really begins to move along. Bosch is most interesting
when he's dealing with others. Particularly enjoyable are those
scenes when we follow Harry as he tries to interview suspects
and find clues, and the difficulty he has making the transition
from an insider to an outsider. The interactions with characters,
the paraplegic especially, have a Chandleresque feel, very dark
and moody.
Getting into Bosch's head is well worth your time,
and Connelly still keeps up his run of quality works. The ending
of the novel is a surprise, but works with Connelly's theme of
balancing the light and darkness of his mission, and the last
third of the book is absolutely riveting. I'm already counting
the days to the next Bosch novel hoping he continues as an LA
private eye.
Lost Light
By Michael Connelly
Little Brown & Company, 2003
400 pages
Buy
this book
Review submitted by
David White, April
2003. Thanks, Dave.
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