Review by New York Times Review
The story opens with a harrowing flashback to the riots of 1992, when South Central went up in flames. Bosch and his partner were sent into this war zone to work an "ordinary" homicide, the execution-style killing of a white woman quickly tagged "Snow White." Like scores of other crimes committed during those chaotic days, the murder of Anneke Jespersen, a Danish photojournalist and international war correspondent, was never solved. With the 20th anniversary of the riots coming up, the top brass try to stop Bosch from revisiting his old turf, anticipating a public-relations nightmare should the murder of a white woman turn out to be the only open case the police manage to close. Bosch won't budge, of course, because that's just the way Bosch is. Connelly has always been scrupulous about following proper procedure, which means that his aging detective must scramble to keep current in the forensic sciences. It's fun to watch an old war horse like Bosch navigating the new technology (or, more often than not, getting younger officers to do it for him). But Bosch is working a 20-year-old case using 20-year-old methods that involve analog human skills, like interrogating hostile witnesses, making blind phone calls and "walking a gun" - cop jargon for methodically linking a single gun to multiple murders. The title of the novel refers to what is probably the most primitive (and symbolically potent) example of such police work: the street cop's handwritten notes, taken in the field and jotted down on index cards to be stored in little black boxes. Handed one of these objects by an old-school cop, Bosch regards it with respectful awe, amazed it escaped the purge that imperfectly transferred all hard files to digital archives. However dated, some artifacts simply must be saved. The upper-class amateur sleuth, an endangered species even in historical mysteries, is very much alive in Charles Finch's charming Victorian whodunits. In A DEATH IN THE SMALL HOURS (Minotaur, $24.99), Charles Lenox packs up his wife and child and flees the hurly-burly of London for his uncle's country estate, where he can gather his thoughts for the keynote speech he's to deliver at a coming session of Parliament. To ward off the torpor of country life, Lenox sets out to investigate certain acts of vandalism that have alarmed Uncle Freddie, who comes from a long line of "gentle gentlemen" and feels responsible for the well-being of the village. Coming from the same ancestral line, Lenox shows a similar gentility when he exposes the vices and misdeeds of the villagers without doing damage to the basic soundness of the community. But while he isn't a social snob like the golden-age sleuths on whom he's modeled, Lenox is fast becoming a paragon of virtue that makes him seem too good to be true. Not only does this member of Parliament argue for stricter child-labor laws, expanded literacy, voting rights and the abolishment of capital punishment, but in defiance of Victorian convention he keeps sneaking into the nursery to cuddle his darling baby daughter. Timothy Hallinan's affable antihero, an accomplished thief but inept sleuth named Junior Bender, makes a terrific first impression in CRASHED (Sono Crime, $25), swinging from a chandelier to escape the jaws of four vicious guard dogs. The burglary that went so horribly wrong was the nasty work of Trey Annunziato, a Los Angeles mob boss who set Bender up in order to blackmail him into working for her. His ostensible assignment is to stop a saboteur from wrecking the multimillion-dollar porn movie Trey is bankrolling. But as he discovers and to his dismay, the real job is to chaperon the star, a beloved child actor who grew up to be a sad and wasted addict, her addled mind currently dwelling on "Planet Zero, where the sky is black and the rivers are full of dead animals." Bender's quick wit and smart mouth make him a boon companion on this oddball adventure. Whether he's earnestly analyzing the meaning of the "dead wet girl ghosts" in Japanese horror movies or simply knocking out a quick bon mot, he talks a great game. After writing several historical novels set in Toronto in the 1890s, Maureen Jennings has shifted her attention to England during the blitz. BEWARE THIS BOY (McClelland & Stewart, $22.99), the second book in this series, sends Inspector Tom Tyler to Birmingham to investigate a fatal explosion in a munitions factory. The plot loses its footing in a political swamp, but the period setting is amazingly vivid and terribly real. Writing with all senses on high alert, Jennings creates a flawless approximation of a typical day in the life of all the girls who worked on weapons assembly lines, their skin yellow and their hair orange from the cordite. And when she takes the story underground during an air raid, those bombs she starts dropping come so close that readers might want to duck their heads and take cover. Michael Connellys hero, a veteran cop, makes sneaky end-runs around the Los Angeles Police Department.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [December 9, 2012]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* At his core, Harry Bosch is a cop with a mission to tip the scales of justice toward the side of murder victims and their survivors. The scales can never be righted, of course, even by solving the cases Bosch is assigned in the Open Unsolved Unit of the LAPD. That is especially true in the 20-year-old murder of Danish journalist Anneke Jesperson, who was killed during the L.A. riots of 1992. What was Jesperson, a white woman, doing in South Central L.A. in the aftermath of the riots? As usual, Bosch faces not only the seeming impossibility of reconstructing a crime that has been cold for two decades but also the roadblocks imposed by the bureaucrats at the top of the LAPD. But Bosch has never met a roadblock he wasn't compelled to either barge through or cannily avoid. Harry is such a compelling character largely due to his fundamentally antiestablishment personality, which leads to chaos as often as to triumph, but also because his unswerving work ethic reflects not simply duty but also respect for the task before him. Harry does it right, even or especially when his bosses want something else entirely. That's the case this time How would it look if a white cop made headlines by solving the riot-related murder of a white woman? Better to let it slide. In real life, we all let things slide, but in life according to Bosch, nothing slides. We like Harry, as we like many other fictional crime solvers, because he never stops, but we love him because he has the scars to prove that never sliding is no easy thing. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Connelly's twenty-fifth book appears in his twentieth year of publishing, an anniversary that his publisher has been celebrating throughout 2012 with various Year of Connelly promotions, all leading up to the publication of The Black Box.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Connelly's excellent 18th Harry Bosch novel (after 2011's The Drop) opens in 1992, a few days after the acquittal of the cops who beat up Rodney King incited an eruption of violence in Los Angeles ("Flames from a thousand fires reflected like the devil dancing in the dark sky"). In a South-Central alley, Bosch and his partner, Jerry Edgar, briefly examine the body of a Danish photojournalist, Anneke Jespersen, who's been shot dead. There's not enough time or police will power to enable Bosch to pursue the case-though he does retrieve a single spent 9mm brass shell casing. Twenty years later, while working cold cases in the LAPD's Open-Unsolved Unit, Bosch gets a second chance to answer for Jespersen. Contemporary forensic technology connects the shell casing to a gun and to the first Iraq war. The tenacious detective finds himself caught in a maelstrom of departmental politics and personal danger as he searches for the "black box" of the title ("a piece of evidence, a person, a positioning of fact that brought a certain understanding and helped explain what happened and why"). Connelly draws on all his resources-his thorough knowledge of police work, his ability to fashion a complex tapestry of plot, and his ever deepening characterization of Bosch-to craft a mystery thriller sure to enthrall fans and newcomers alike. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In Connelly's 19th Harry Bosch crime novel (after The Drop), the approaching 20th anniversary of the 1992 L.A. riots finds Harry assigned to a task force taking a fresh look at unsolved cases from that time. Harry was at the scene of the murder of a female photojournalist from Denmark back then and has carried the guilt over that investigation being buried in the chaos of the uprising. Now he has a second chance to make things right. Harry's brilliance for intuitive thinking and doggedness for pursuing his hunch lead him to follow the clue of a single bullet found at the murder scene. What looks like a back-alley killing has a much deeper story that sends Bosch following a cover-up involving the U.S. Navy. Balancing his personal life, dodging an antagonistic lieutenant, and pursuing the case challenge Harry and engage the reader. Verdict Recommended for readers who enjoy consistently strong character development and police procedurals with tough, ethical detectives fighting crime. Ridley Pearson's novels offer a similar experience. [See Prepub Alert, 5/12/12.]-Susan Carr, Edwardsville P.L., IL (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Harry Bosch (The Drop, 2011, etc.) returns to yet another cold case--one that was taken out of his hand 20 years ago when it was still red hot. Assigned to an emergency rotation in South-Central LA during the Rodney King riots, Harry's sent out to an alley off Crenshaw Boulevard, where National Guard troops have found a body. The victim turns out to be Copenhagen journalist Anneke Jespersen, executed by a bullet to the head. With the city in the throes of a violent crisis, there's no time to work this case or any other, and the death gets tossed into the deep freeze till it's defrosted 20 years later by the LAPD's Open-Unsolved Unit. Now, however, some remarkable developments are waiting to be discovered. The Beretta handgun used in the crime has been traced to long-imprisoned gangbanger Rufus Coleman, whose brief off-the-record statement allows Harry to link the gun to at least two other murders in the intervening years. If the search for information about the weapon, mostly carried out by Harry's long-suffering partner David Chu, seems almost too easy, the questions that stymied Harry back in 1992--what brought a Danish reporter to America, to riot-torn LA and to the alley where she met her death, and why was she killed?--prove just as hard to answer, especially since Harry's new boss, Lt. Cliff O'Toole, makes it clear that on the 20th anniversary of the LAPD's darkest hour, he doesn't want the only case from that sorry chapter cleared to be the one that involved a white woman. Harry naturally meets O'Toole's opposition by raising the stakes. The resulting tension lifts this sturdy but uninspired procedural above most of its competition, though nowhere close to the top of Connelly's own storied output.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
