Saralee Says
When a Michael Connelly novel is published, my husband Larry and I have to toss a coin to see who gets to read it first, especially those featuring Harry Bosch, a detective with the Los Angeles Police Department.
I must issue a warning - Connelly's latest book, Lost Light, is meant to be read in one sitting. It is impossible to put down, and I think it is Connelly's best book yet. For those of you who have not read one of Connelly's books, he is a journalist who wrote Blood Work (a recent movie staring Clint Eastwood), The Poet and Chasing The Dime. He is from that infamous school of crime, south Florida, which produced authors Carl Hiaasen, Edna Buchanan, and Elmore Leonard. Connelly's style of writing is intense, humorous, haunting and compelling.
What does a former homicide detective who could barely survive the internal politics of the police do when he leaves the police department? If you are 52-year-old Harry Bosch, you become a private investigator and work freelance.
Angella Benton was brutally murdered years ago, and she worked for hotshot Alexander Taylor, a pretentious Hollywood producer. Bosch was haunted by her murder because she died with her hands stretched upward as if trying to tell him something. Benton also stood out because she was a nobody, and when you are a nobody and are murdered, solving the crime may not be a priority.
Bosch was originally assigned to investigate and solve this case but was replaced by police headquarters when it became known that the victim worked for a Hollywood movie company. The higher ups did not really care about the dead woman, but the publicity demanded that a team of detectives from headquarters handle the investigation in the correct manner. They never solved the crime, and the murder became a cold case that no one actively worked on. Now that Bosch is retired, the police department cannot stop him from working that cold case.
Do you think Connelly went too easy, or was he too harsh with the FBI and Homeland Security? Was he accurate in his portrayal of the FBI and the way people should be interrogated today?
The ending of this intense novel will make you sit straight up - it is simply one of the best endings ever written in mystery.
Larry's Language
The first question for our book club discussion should be why did we pick Michael Connelly's new book, Lost Light (Little, Brown), as opposed to hundreds of other good mysteries?
The answer is, we could have picked many other fine crime novels such as Vapor Trail by Chuck Logan, Naked Prey by John Sandford, Back Story by Robert Parker or A Darker Justice by Nashvillian Sallie Bissell. We could have selected mystery writers like Nevada Barr, Jan Burke, James Crumley, Stuart Woods, James Lee Burke, or Nashvillians Steven Womack and Cecelia Tishy.
We picked Lost Light because of its setting in Los Angeles and its character development of Hieronymus, better known as Harry Bosch. How can you resist an author who names his chief detective after a 15th-century Flemish mystical painter best known for his work "Garden of Earthly Delights," which includes the famous panel named "Seven Deadly Sins"?
The characters in Lost Light make unique contributions to the level of suspense of the story because our understanding of who the good and bad guys are changes as the plot progresses. Author Michael Connelly is a genius at misdirecting the attention of the reader and legitimately fooling us. He gives us all the standard reasons to like some of the characters and then shows us why we are wrong. In fact, this is true for one major player right up until the last chapter of the book.
The main character is our detective Harry Bosch, who was a fiercely independent Los Angles Police Department investigator but could not live within the bureaucracy and could not abide the official police culture. Now he exists in a purgatory of part acceptance, part rejection by his former colleagues as he attempts to discover and shape his true self by searching for justice for a young woman murdered four years earlier.
The suspense arises from trying to make the connections between the four-year-old murder, the two police officers who were later gunned down, the missing $2 million in bank money, the murder of an FBI agent, the role of Homeland Security, official corruption, and a money laundering operation. Author Connelly will surprise you at every twist and turn.
Join us for our next book club discussion, which will feature Chancellors, Commodores and Co-eds: The History of Vanderbilt University by local writer Bill Carey.
