The Black Box (A Harry Bosch Novel Book 16)

I had never heard of thriller writer Michael Connelly until my friend Pat Sullivan mentioned his name in response to one of my rants about Lee Child’s Reacher series; I think it says a lot that after I finished The Black Box, Connelly’s latest novel featuring LAPD detective Harry Bosch, I was sorry I hadn’t started reading his stuff when he first started putting it out 20 years ago.The Bosch books (Connelly also writes legal thrillers featuring an attorney named Mickey Haller, including The Lincoln Lawyer, on which the film starring Matthew McConaughey was based) fall into the classic police procedural category, a genre that begins with the protagonist (usually a detective of police) being assigned to a case (usually a murder) and investigating it, step-by-step, until the malefactor is arrested or otherwise brought to justice.True to this form, in The Black Box Bosch fights departmental indifference, a hostile and essentially imbecilic supervisor, an internal affairs investigation and a crooked law enforcement executive while methodically investigating the coldest of cold cases: the execution-style murder of a Danish freelance reporter and photographer during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.The hero of this novel has the virtue of verisimilitude: Unlike Child, whose hero, Jack Reacher, is a superman, genius and expert marksman, Connelly keeps his action believable by presenting a protagonist who is a somewhat creaky police veteran close to retirement age. Harry Bosch makes deductive mistakes and sometimes misses clues or misinterprets them. Although he is a good marksman with his handgun, he can’t free himself from bonds by brute strength, or overcome a half-dozen villains in hand-to-hand combat; in one section of this novel, he exhausts himself simply by walking through a muddy orchard after nightfall.Black Box author Michael Connelly uses police jargon sparinglybut to great effect.What’s more, Bosch sounds like the cop he is. Connelly uses police jargon sparingly, but the terminology he inserts in his dialog has the ring of authenticity. His other characters also have unique voices.Consider the section of the book when Bosch takes his teenage daughter, a handgun enthusiast, to the police range for simulated "shoot-don’t-shoot" exercises. Both Bosch and the range master are jazz fans, and their discussion of different musicians seems as natural and credible as the technical terminology they use to discuss the simulations Bosch and his daughter face.And although the musical discussion turns on artists who are probably unknown to the average reader, Connelly makes it easy to follow and the interchange helps to establish Bosch and his police chum as real people with interests outside their jobs as cops.Compare this to the stultifying Popular Mechanics approach Lee Child uses in the Reacher books, each of which contains thousands of words of technical readout about guns and ammunition that do little to push the story forward or make Reacher seem like a real flesh-and-blood individual.Connelly also manages to cover the procedural bases of his novel by recapping his protagonist’s investigative techniques, explaining what he does and why without suffocating readers with too many boring details, dead ends and bum tips.He skillfully adds texture and depth to his story by giving us glimpses into Bosch’s fitful romantic life, his relationship with his daughter and his interaction with his departmental co-workers, but he doesn’t overwhelm us with personal details that pull us away from the mystery his detective is trying to solve.In other words, everything in The Black Box is there for a reason, which adds to the satisfaction the reader feels when the climax occurs.And not every loose end is neatly tied up at the end of the book: enough strands are still trailing that the reader actually hopes some of them will be taken in hand in the next installment of the Bosch saga. For instance, when we finish the last page of this novel, we are unsure how Bosch will manage to recover a working relationship with his moronic boss and whether he will somehow patch up his romantic entanglement with the social worker he has been dating. Most intriguingly, we never find out why internal affairs Detective Nancy Mendenhall, the investigator who has been probing misconduct allegations against Bosch, takes critical actions that put her on the scene at the novel’s denouement.(To discuss Mendenhall’s role in too much detail would raise spoilers, but suffice to say her actions remain a mystery when the book is over, and I, for one, suspect we are going to see more of her in future Bosch thrillers.)The police procedural style has yielded a large number of popular crime classics, among which are the 87th Precinct stories by Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), gritty LAPD detective novels by Joseph Wambaugh such as The Blue Knight and The Choirboys, the Jim Cree/Joe Leaphorn tribal police stories of Tony Hillerman, tales involving Martin Cruz Smith’s politically incorrect Russian militsia detective, Arkady Renko, and the Martin Beck series by husband and wife team Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.Because they closely adhere to established investigative techniques and often feature them as a key element of the narrative, procedural novels have gained sufficient international popularity to allow the main characters to be shifted out of their native countries in motion pictures based on them.For example, Sjowall and Wahloo’s protagonist in The Laughing Policeman, Martin Beck, became Jake Martin, a San Francisco detective in Stuart Rosenberg’s 1973 film version; and Hunter’s 87th Precinct investigators from the novel King’s Ransom (1959) were transformed into a Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department team investigating a kidnaping in Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 movie, High and Low.But one of the things I most enjoy about procedurals is that they frequently fit into the red noir category of literature that I have discussed in some of my earlier essays: thrillers that serve up a critique of modern capitalist society while masquerading as entertaining genre fiction.The Black Box certainly fits this pattern: Bosch’s investigation uncovers corruption in high places as well as the use of corporate profits to buy influence and political power. A public servant is unmasked as an assassin who serves as a hired thug for a twisted businessman. While he is trying to ferret out the truth, Bosch suffers interference from a departmental superior who could be a pointy-haired boss right out of the comic strip, Dilbert. In fact, his immediate boss, Lieutenant O’Toole, is a living example of the Peter Principle: managers tend to receive promotions until they reach their level of maximum incompetence.Bosch even runs afoul of the LAPD’s chief of police, who inserts himself in the case for political reasons in a way that threatens the detective’s ability to close it with a definitive solution after two decades. Through all this capitalist corruption and administrative ineptitude, Bosch soldiers on, the rumpled knight without illusions that Raymond Chandler wrote about in his 1950 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder:”“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”That brief passage describes Michael Connelly’s detective, Harry Bosch, perfectly. I feel better for having had the opportunity to meet him in The Black Box, and I look forward to a long and satisfying friendship with him in the future.

I love Harry Bosch. In fact I should be getting the next book today

purchased as a gift

The negative:On the second to last page Connelly wrote "She would not tell Bosch why she ..." did something. That bothered me. It was important. I hope he answers it in the next book. But I have to wait a year? I believe the author said he was late finishing this book. Maybe that's why he left it unexplained.The positive:One of the things he does so well is: When Harry first starts a case, I'm thinking how can he possibly solve this? How will he find anything? What can he do? Then he finds one small piece of something and follows it. He gathers a couple more odd pieces of information and I'm still thinking how could he possibly ever solve this? Even later in the book, I'm still thinking that. Yes this is a mystery slowly uncovering evidence. But Connelly does it in a special way which is not predictable and keeps me wondering. That's a neat talent. I was immersed all the way through. I didn't want to stop reading. At the end the mystery was solved, but I wanted to see what Harry would do next. I wanted to continue reading about Harry's life which I guess is the next book - next year. So, it was done before I was ready to be done. But I suppose that's good.DATA:Narrative mode: 3rd person. Story length: 403 pages. Swearing language: strong, including religious swear words, but not often used. Sexual content: none. Setting: 1992 and 2012 California. Copyright: 2012. Genre: crime mystery with a little suspense.OTHER BOOKS - FOUR SERIES (Bosch, McEvoy, McCaleb, Haller):I recommend reading the Harry Bosch books in order, but it would be ok to try "The Last Coyote" or "Lost Light" first, just to see if you like the style. Then go back and read the rest in order. Following is my recommended reading order. I've included four series within this list because there is a date flow and the characters interact. All of these books could be read as stand-alones, but reading them in order provides richer character development.3 stars. The Black Echo (Bosch #1)3 ½ stars. The Black Ice (Bosch #2)4 stars. The Concrete Blonde (Bosch #3)5 stars. The Last Coyote (Bosch #4)4 stars. Trunk Music (Bosch #5)4 stars. Angels Flight (Bosch #6)4 ½ stars. Blood Work (McCaleb #1) Bosch is not in this.3 ½ stars. A Darkness More Than Night (McCaleb #2) (Bosch #7) McCaleb is the primary investigator, but he interacts with Bosch.3 ½ stars. City Of Bones (Bosch #8)5 stars. Lost Light (Bosch #9)5 stars. The Poet (McEvoy #1) Bosch is not in this. Read this any time before "The Narrows."4 stars. The Narrows (sequel to The Poet) (Bosch #10) Bosch is the main investigator.3 stars. The Closers (Bosch #11)3 ½ stars. Echo Park (Bosch #12)4 stars. The Overlook (short, half-length) (Bosch #13)4 ½ stars. The Lincoln Lawyer (Haller #1) Bosch is not in this.4 stars. The Brass Verdict (Haller #2) (Bosch #14) Bosch has a small part in this.4 ½ stars. Nine Dragons. (Bosch #15) Haller has a small part in this.3 stars. The Reversal. (Haller #3) (Bosch #16) Mostly Haller. Bosch has a secondary role.3 stars. The Fifth Witness (Haller #4)5 stars. The Drop (Bosch #17)5 stars. The Black Box (Bosch #18)5 stars. The Gods of Guilt (Haller #5)

Once I started reading 'The Black Box', I was hooked. The novel opens with the 1992 riots in Los Angeles. In the midst of the fires, looting, etc, Harry Bosch gets sent to investigate the death of a young woman who has been shot. But as he starts his detailed investigation of the crime scene, he is ordered to leave it and attend to another incident. The case is handed over to a unit set up to investigate the crimes that occurred during the riots but they do not have any success in solving it. The story then jumps forward 20 years and Bosch, now in his early 60s, is working in the Open - Unsolved unit of the LAPD. With the 20th anniversary of the riots looming, there is a renewed focus by senior police officials on solving some of the cold cases relating to that time and Harry manages to get himself assigned to this particular case as he felt he owed it to the victim to bring it to closure.I found this story a little different from earlier books in the series in that there are no red herrings or twists and turns in this story. It is a more straight forward police procedural novel and the quality of the writing and storytelling is so good you feel as if you are a fly on the wall, watching every step that Harry Bosch takes in his hunt to solve the crime. From the very scant evidence available, Bosch's progress in trying to solve the crime is initially painstakingly slow (as one would probably expect in such circumstances). But progress is made and the pace of the book increases dramatically as the story reaches its dramatic climax.In this novel, more so than in the earlier ones, there are clear signs that Bosch is ageing. This is brought into sharp focus in the passages that involve his home life; his constant struggle as an older single parent to connect and cope with his teenage daughter; his love of jazz music and the increasingly emotional impact it is having on him, etc. In addition, Harry is taking more risks and not necessarily following the new more politically correct way of conducting enquiries, which gets him into trouble with the powers that be. Harry is also acting more impulsively than in the past. This more personal and emotional side of Bosch's character is a more prominent feature in this novel compared with other recent books in the series, and for me made it all the richer.Overall, I really enjoyed this novel. It may lack some of the complexity of the plots of some of the earlier books in the series, but personally I liked discovering how Bosch's character is maturing and, for a change, reading a more traditional and straightforward police procedural novel.

It is a very difficult cold case for detective Harry Bosch to investigate, very little in evidence, leads, witnesses, and police officers to talk to about the case, so Harry keeps digging he follows a lot of hunches.He finally gets a lead, and he talks to someone who he thinks might help him, Harry puts him under pressure even though he has nothing in hard evidence, the guy cracks, then the door were he lives is smashed open with a gun welding police officer, Harry gets kidnapped held prisoner ..... very good ending.

I have read all the Harry Bosch books in the series and enjoyed everyone immensely. Sometimes it seems that the book is slow in starting, or a story subject of little interest, don't give up you will not be disappointed. Michael's knowledge of the Law and procedures in applying it is second to none.For me I find it sad that his use of the English Language is Americanised but I guess many of his readers are American. One of the worst for me is the word 'Gotten', there is of course no such word in correct English. The storyline more than makes up for this. I recommend reading the books in the correct order, although they are predominately stand alone books, there is a degree of follow on.

One of the better ones but not without its stupidities. Begins with a murder of a Danish reporter during the 1992 riots in LA, Harry is the first responder but it is not solved nor properly investigated. Naturally Harry is obsessed with it - another one - and his Cold Case Unit investigates 20 years later. He falls out with his boss, again but a different one, is sort of warned off by HQ for political reasons and so goes off piste again as Harry does. He performs a Houdini act with the prong of a watch strap buckle - really - and is saved by the IA agent who is investigating him and who, almost inexplicably, followed him into the hornets nest which Harry as poked with a large stick. We get some father/daughter bonding in a shooting gallery - only in America - but that is the only bit of padding. It rattles along and is the usual slick easy read and, perhaps, the author has taken better care with the plot as it is his 25th book and an anniversary of the riots.

I'm still reading the Bosch books in order and have loved nearly every one. This is no exception with some vintage Bosch detective work doggedly using intuition and the tiniest of clues to track down the bad guys.....in spite of the problems of police politics. Good, tight writing, as always, with the story being pulled forward using clever dialogue and short, sharp sentences with no wastage. Connelly is very good at this and also capturing the very essence of LA and West Coast culture and lifestyle. I wasn't that impressed with the ending but nevertheless enjoyed the book. I rarely give five stars but Connelly nearly always hits the spot for me.