Echo Park by Michael Connelly

WC Don reported recently on an early Harry Bosch novel by Michael Connelly, not too favorably as I recall. A couple weeks ago I added a more recent Harry Bosch novel called The Overlook. In that book, the Harry Bosch character repeatedly referred back to a case in Echo Park so I decided to get it.

Harry Bosch was a police detective, got disillusioned and retired, then unretired. This book is early in his 2nd stint with the LAPD open-unsolved crimes unit. 13 years earlier he had failed to solve a particularly grizzly murder and periodically goes back to the files and sort of reopens the case. He thought he had his guy, but could never make the case stick. Now, an under the radar serial killer gets picked up in a routine stake out on another case. His lawyer tries to work a deal to save his client from the needle by having him to confess to all his previously unknown crimes as well as Bosch's old case. But Bosch thinks it's too clean. Things go horribly wrong with the deal, officers die, and loose ends start to unravel that end up looking like a plate of spaghetti (Italian reference in honor of WC Don’s October holiday in Italy). How he puts the case together, moving from one lead to another, from one suspect to another, is an interesting web of lies, deceit, and manipulations. A solid B for me. Not as good as Richard Price or George Pelecanos, better than Stuart Woods, maybe on a par with T Jefferson Parker? Anway…I have another Bosch novel to read on this trip.

WC Don called Bosch a ‘maverick’. Now I’m not as literate as he, so I don’t really know what a maverick is…only maverick I hear about today is McCain and that might not be the best example. Regardless, I’ve tried to envision who might play him were a movie to be made, something I often do. His history includes being a tunnel rat in Vietnam, so that places him to be in his late 50’s, at least in Echo Park. So who’d play him in the movies? Harrison Ford is too good looking I think. Vigo Mortensen is too hard (if you don’t believe me, see Eastern Promises). Actually thought Richard Dreyfuss might work. Gene Hackman has retired for the most part. Maybe Chris Cooper (Bourne’s CIA boss in Bourne Identity) or David Strathairn (played Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck), or even Ed Harris. Anyway…I like the recent Connelly work and based on WC Don’s statement, will probably work backward until I get bored rather than starting from the beginning as he thought the book he read, one of Connelly’s early works, was a bit weak. But I’ll be coming back to more Connelly novels for now.

East Coast Don