The black ice

Plan ahead before you read this buzz saw of a novel. Don't start unless you have the next day off. A couple of cool beverages will also be needed, as will a sandwich or two. Hey, it's a long book, and once you start, you will finish. Harry Bosch, who made his debut in the acclaimed Black Echo [BKL F 1 92], is a smart, determined LAPD homicide detective who's driven by an inner sense of justice. This time out he arrives early on the scene of a fellow officer's suicide; then he's told it's not his case: back off. Fat chance. Harry senses the officer may have gone over to the bad guys and was killed when he tried to tiptoe back to the right side of the tracks. At every turn, Harry is confronted by dirty cops struggling to save their collective butts by lying and misdirecting the investigation. The key turns out to be black ice, a deadly new synthetic drug. Author Connelly, a Los Angeles Times reporter, knows crime, cops, and criminals. Most of all, he knows that dangerous no-man's-land where the three intersect. A powerful novel in a series that seems destined for wide popularity. ~--Wes Lukowsky

In this surehanded sequel to The Black Echo , LAPD detective Hieronymous ``Harry'' Bosch stalks drug traffickers in L.A. and Mexico. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Second tense, tightly wound tangle of a case for Hieronymous Bosch (The Black Echo, 1991). This time out, the LAPD homicide cop, who's been exiled to Hollywood Division for his bumptious behavior, sniffs out the bloody trail of the designer drug ``black ice.'' Connelly (who covers crime for the Los Angeles Times) again flexes his knowledge of cop ways--and of cop-novel clichés. Cast from the hoary mold of the maverick cop, Bosch pushes his way onto the story's core case--the apparent suicide of a narc--despite warnings by top brass to lay off. Meanwhile, Bosch's boss, a prototypical pencil-pushing bureaucrat hoping to close out a majority of Hollywood's murder cases by New Year's Day, a week hence, assigns the detective a pile of open cases belonging to a useless drunk, Lou Porter. One of the cases, the slaying of an unidentified Hispanic, seems to tie in to the death of the narc, which Bosch begins to read as murder stemming from the narc's dirty involvement in black ice. When Porter is murdered shortly after Bosch speaks to him, and then the detective's love affair with an ambitious pathologist crashes, Bosch decides to head for Mexico, where clues to all three murders point. There, the well-oiled, ten- gear narrative really picks up speed as Bosch duels with corrupt cops; attends the bullfights; breaks into a fly-breeding lab that's the distribution center for Mexico's black-ice kingpin; and takes part in a raid on the kingpin's ranch that concludes with Bosch waving his jacket like a matador's cape at a killer bull on the rampage. But the kingpin escapes, leading to a not wholly unexpected twist--and to a touching assignation with the dead narc's widow. Expertly told, and involving enough--but lacking the sheer artistry and heart-clutching thrills of, say, David Lindsay's comparable Stuart Haydon series (Body of Evidence, etc.).