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Book Review
City of Bones
by Michael Connelly
Publisher: Little Brown & Company
Published: April 2002
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About the Book
On New Year's Day, Detective Harry Bosch fields a call that a dog has found a bone—a bone that the dog's owner, a doctor, feels certain is a human bone.
Bosch investigates, and that chance discovery leads him to a shallow grave in the Hollywood hills, evidence of a murder committed more than twenty years earlier. It's a cold case, but it stirs up Bosch's memories of his own childhood as an orphan in the city. He can't let it go. Digging through police reports and hospital records, tracking down street kids and runaways from the 1970s, Bosch finds a family ripped apart by an absence—and a trail, ever more tenuous, into a violent, terrifying world.
As the case takes Bosch deeper into the past, a rookie cop named Julia Brasher brings him alive in the present in a way no one has in years. Bosch has been warned about the trouble that comes with dating a rookie, but no warning could withstand the heat between them—or prepare Bosch for the explosions when the case takes a hard turn. A suspect bolts, a cop is shot, and suddenly Bosch's cold case has all of L.A. in an uproar—and Bosch fighting to keep control in a lawless and brutal showdown.
Drawing on the "precision-tooled twists" and "wellspring of authentically lurid detail" (Los Angeles magazine) that have made him one of the fastest-selling novelists at work today, Michael Connelly has written a riveting, hard-edged, and unforgettable thriller, proof that he is among "the most talented of crime writers" (The New Yorker).
About the Author
Michael Connelly
MCONNELLY decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing—a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews. After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. You can read this story at the Sun-Sentinel web site. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper echelons of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and landing him in the city about which Chandler, his literary hero, had written.
After three years on the crime beat, Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published in 1992, and later won the Edgar Award for best first novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Connelly followed up with three more Bosch books, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote, before publishing The Poet, a thriller with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist, in 1996. In 1997, he went back to Bosch with Trunk Music, and in 1998 another non-series thriller, Blood Work, was published. Blood Work was inspired in part by a friend's receiving of a heart transplant and the attendant "survivor's guilt" the friend experienced, knowing that someone died in order that he have the chance to live. Connelly has been interested and fascinated by those same feelings as expressed by the survivors of the plane crash he wrote about years before. Blood Work is soon to be released as a major motion picture in early fall 2002 starring Clint Eastwood, Anjelica Houston, and Jeff Daniels. Angels Flight was released in 1999 and was another entry in the Harry Bosch series. Void Moon, was released in 2000, and introduced a new character, Cassie Black, a high-stakes Las Vegas thief. His 2001 release, A Darkness More Than Night, united Harry Bosch with Terry McCaleb from Blood Work, and was named one of the Best Books Of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times.
Michael Connelly was also one of the creators, writers, and consulting producers of Level 9, a TV show about a task force fighting cyber crime that ran on UPN in the fall of 2000.
Connelly's books have won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Nero, Maltese Falcon (Japan), .38 Caliber (France), and Grand Prix (France) awards. He lives with his wife and daughter.
- Bio courtesy of www.michaelconnelly.com
Thriller of the Month Contest
Each month we're highlighting TWBookmark's Thriller of the Month contest. This month's selection is City of Bones. To enter, please visit TWBookmark's Thriller of the Month page.
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