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Friday, February 01, 2013
to live and investigate in LA
Title: The Harry Bosch Novels
Author: Michael Connelly
bookmark: nookmark
I got an ebook from the library that had the first three Harry Bosch novels in one package. I had already read the last one, but that was years ago, so I read Black Echo, Black Ice, and The Concrete Blonde (again) in about a week, maybe more.
I'm only writing one post, because I am lazy, and I'm the only one who even looks at this anymore.
Harry was a tunnel rat in Vietnam; this plays heavily in the first book, when a fellow tunnel rat's body is found (in a tunnel, no less) near the Mulholland Dam. In finding out whodunit and why, Harry also cracks open a year-old bank robbery case, draws the attention of IAD (who have been on his case since the Dollmaker shooting a couple years before the series starts), and gets freaky with a hottie FBI agent with her own skeletonized closet.
In Black Ice, Harry's service in Nam is mentioned, but it's not as big a deal--though he does still end up in a tunnel. His boss, Harvey "Ninety-Eight" Pounds, wants a case closed before the end of the year so the books balance better, so when a flaky detective takes a leave of absence because the stress is breaking him down, his caseload ends up on Bosch's desk with an order to find an easy case, and close it. Now. By the end of the book, Bosch has solved four or five murders and destroyed a drug-smuggling operation, but most of those murders happen during the course of his first investigation, so it's not clear whether they count for the Lieutenant's quota. Oh, and he ends a relationship with the ME and starts one with a freshly-widowed cop's wife. Because that scene was TOTALLY plausible.
All I remembered about The Concrete Blonde (before re-reading it) was something about ankles, and a porn cop. That's a cop who investigates and helps regulate porn, not the one who shows up in short-shorts at your bachelorette party and says "there's been a noise complaint ladies, and I'm gonna need you to stuff money in my pants." Anyway, there's a civil suit related to the Dollmaker shooting that Bosch keeps mentioning in his internal monologue, and he has to deal with that while there's a new investigation because a body has turned up that matches the Dollmaker's MO, and a note which also matches, but at least he's still with Dead Cop's Wife (she may not know the SPOILER ALERT that her dead husband was a dirty cop who tried to take over the drug-smuggling operation in Black Ice by faking his death, killing the real kingpin, and taking over his life, which was spoiled when Bosch figured it out and killed him in a kill-or-be-killed confrontation, but SPOILER ALERT OVER at least she and Bosch have settled into a comfortable domestic situation, and Bosch tells her he loves her awwwwww).
Again, I don't know if it's an error in the originals, or something that happens when they're sloppy about making ebooks, but I saw a lot of errors. The one that bothered me most was when Sylvia handed Bosch the same cup of coffee twice in one scene during Black Ice. And I don't know if there are really as many corrupt cops in LA as these books imply, but if I were in Public Relations for the LAPD, I might write Connelly a nice letter asking him to maybe cut the force a little slack and let a bad guy the bad guy every once in a while.Labels: drugs, mystery/detective, series
posted by reyn at
11:54 AM
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Sunday, August 26, 2012
Where the schemers and the meth addicts roam
Title: Death Without Company
Author: Craig Johnson
Bookmark: I shouldn't even bother anymore.
Sheriff Walt Longmire had a rough month. He nearly lost an ear to frostbite, his best friend to a twitchy and paranoid young man with a target on his back, and his (smoking hot) deputy to three prestigious job offers. He kept all three of them, but the woman he loved is gone and his prime suspect in a recent series of killings stuck the barrel of a high-powered rifle under their chin and pulled the trigger.
Naturally, there was a period of adjustment. He grew a beard. He adopted the woman's dog when it arrived on his back porch (though he still hasn't given Dog a real name), and he hardly ever itches his ear anymore. Henry Standing Bear has recovered from his injuries, and Santiago Saizarbitoria is on his way up from Cheyenne to interview for the position vacated when Branch joined the highway patrol. Vic is her usual (gorgeous) foul-mouthed self, and nobody would have her any other way, but her husband is gone and the divorce finalized.
Walt is doing much better. His friend and predecessor Lucian Connolly is not. Mari Baroja has died in her room at the Durant Home for Assisted Living, and Lucian suspects foul play. Walt isn't convinced at first, but he plays along and soon learns there was far more to the Basque woman than met the eye. Like her three-hour marriage to Lucian, the granddaughter who owns a bakery in town, and the millions she holds in mineral rights on her land.
As Walt and Vic keep digging (with able assistance from Saizarbitorio--rechristened "Sancho" by Vic--, Henry, and Dog), they find that this mystery spans generations, and includes more bodies than anyone would have guessed. Lucian won't tell what he knows, key players are brutally attacked, and more subtle attempts are made on other lives. Walt has to find his way through all of these obstacles to find out who is behind the killings, and why. Meanwhile, an official from the treasury department is in town to go through abandoned safety deposit boxes, and she has her eye on the sheriff of Absaroka County.
I could go into the list of reasons I love the book, but they're the same reasons I love The Cold Dish. Great characters who work well with one another, an intriguing and believable plot, and Wyoming. It's still not Oregon, but it's close enough to make me homesick in the very best of ways. Reading Longmire books is like taking a trip back west for me, even if my days were never so exciting as Walt's.Labels: drugs, mystery/detective, o pioneers, western
posted by reyn at
3:56 PM
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Friday, February 10, 2012
Shutter the Front Door
Title: Shutter Island (graphic novel adaptation)
Author: Dennis Lehane
Illustrator: Christian de Metter
Bookmark: seriously? it's a graphic novel. I set it down once with a pen between the pages, then I finished doing the dishes and read the rest.
I noticed this on the shelf behind me while I was busy stealing the library's wifi the other day, and decided to pull it because I was too cheap to see the movie. It wasn't until I got home that I realized the movie was not based upon the graphic novel, but that they were both based upon one of those books with lots of words and no pictures.
That other book might have been a better choice.
I don't always get the point of graphic novels. I read the two which formed the basis for the Surrogates movie (I never posted them. Sue me.), and while the story seemed kind of interesting, the art looked choppy. It was kind of hard to view. Hard enough that I read all the text, and glanced at the images enough to give me some idea of where the speakers were (it was sometimes difficult to distinguish the scratchy lines of one character from the scratchy lines for another, so if they didn't address one another by name, I wasn't always certain who I was reading). I found that I had to remind myself that I was reading a graphic novel, and I missed the point of that if I never looked at the graphics, so I'd go back a few pages, glance at the art, and then go back to just reading the text. I had that problem with Shutter Island, too--the two main characters wore identical clothing, so I could only distinguish them when they took off their hats, and that wasn't often. Most of the time, it was in such a dark space that I still couldn't tell who it was. And without the pictures to explain what was happening, the plot is even harder to follow. I would have been better off with a wall of text to explain things.
My best effort:
US Marshall Ted Daniels and his partner Chuck Aule take the ferry to Shutter Island just before a hurricane hits to try to find a woman who has somehow escaped the mental facility which is isolated there. The facility houses criminally insane and dangerous people. During the course of four or five days, Ted becomes obsessed with cracking a strange numeric code left by the woman and finding the mysterious Patient 67 to which the code alludes. The hurricane isolates them from the mainland, shuts down communication, and plays hell with their power. The hospital staff seem to be hiding something, he has strange dreams which seem to lead him closer to the truth, and rock piles on the island's beaches seem to spell out a message from the missing woman in the same code he found in her notebook. Pretty reachy.
If you've seen the movie, then you probably know the rest. Maybe you can explain it to me. Maybe I'll get the real book and have another go at this.Labels: crazy people, drugs, graphic novels, irresponsible parents, murder
posted by reyn at
7:26 PM
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Monday, August 29, 2011
Brain-puckering
Title: The Dreadful Lemon Sky
Author: John D. MacDonald
Bookmark: UP bookmark
It's not that I'm on a sudden MacDonald kick; it's that I found books in my apartment I'd never read before. I don't even know why I have them, or if they've been borrowed, and I need to return them to a rightful owner somewhere. If I borrowed a book from you years ago, let me know.
I'm glad I found them. I'd never read MacDonald before Cinnamon Skin, but I really like his work, even if some of it is a bit dated (many times during both books I thought "Holy shit! ...Well, it was the seventies..." or pondered how very different the story would have been if the protagonists had access to the internet or cell phones).
This time, an old acquaintance of McGee's (the jacket and Wikipedia article refer to her as "an old friend," but it turns out she was a one-night stand who later borrowed his boat for her honeymoon with a toolbag) shows up in the middle of the night with a box full of cash and a request: hold the cash. If he doesn't hear from her for a month, he should send it all to her sister. As payment, he keeps ten grand (roughly ten percent of the total stash). He quickly surmises that the money was no acquired through entirely legal channels, but she refuses to answer questions, insisting that he is being paid to hold the dough, not ask questions about it.
Naturally, she's dead before the month is up, and he decides to investigate.
SPOILERS ABOUND
The weird thing about the entire story is that while Meyer and McGee gets lots of solid leads and dutifully follow them all over Florida, they don't actually solve the case. They push enough buttons that the answer sort of falls out at their feet, but the answer they get isn't the one they expected--even though their expectations change a couple times along the way. For instance, when a prime suspect gets killed. They may have cracked the case, but I don't know that I'd say they solved it.
END SPOILERS
As any reader of mysteries might surmise, there is a lot more going on than anyone realizes, and by the end they have tangled with a drunken marina master (McGee "tangles" with the man's widow), a serial rapist with political ambitions, a landlord drug dealer, and a big nest of fire ants. Good times!
Labels: drugs, murder, mystery/detective
posted by reyn at
6:44 PM
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