Reviews - Riverside Public Library

Booklist Reviews

*Starred Review* Harry Bosch has jumped from being an LAPD cop to an ex–LAPD cop multiple times throughout the long run of this acclaimed series, but now it appears he's hung up his shield for good, given his latest acrimonious exit and the suit he's brought against the department. Harry's still working, though, both as a volunteer at a suburban cop shop and as a PI, but he's very picky about his cases, which is why when a billionaire of dubious reputation comes calling, Harry is leery. But the mogul, nearing death, has a compelling story to tell: a dalliance with a Latina student decades ago may have produced a child, who may or not still be alive but who may have produced a grandchild. Harry's job is to determine if there is an heir and then to report only to the mogul, not to any of his greedy underlings. The first part goes relatively easily—yes, there is an heir—but the reporting part, not so much, as the mogul is murdered before Harry has a chance to talk to him. Juggling his investigation with the responsibilities of his volunteer gig, now focused on trying to catch a serial rapist, Harry finds himself caught between the sometimes contradictory demands of finding bad guys and helping victims. Unlike so many authors of long-running series, Connelly continues to discover new depths to his character and new stories to tell that reveal those depths in always compelling ways. Hats off one more time to a landmark crime series.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Harry Bosch is almost as big a success on TV as he is in print, and the resulting shock wave of promotional opportunities continues to reverberate. Copyright 2016 Booklist Reviews.

BookPage Reviews

Whodunit: A strange mission for young Jack Reacher

Lee Child's latest Jack Reacher novel, Night School, is set in 1996, when Reacher is serving in the Army, before the fall of the World Trade Center, before the widely anticipated but happily unrealized Y2K meltdown. After earning a medal for a deep-cover "wet work" mission, Reacher receives an unusual follow-up assignment to attend a small class, three members only: an FBI agent, a CIA analyst and Reacher himself. It quickly becomes evident that the "school" is anything but, and its students find themselves tasked with the rather amorphous mission of stopping a clandestine $100 million terrorist-related action that may or may not be happening. The problem is, $100 million is a strange amount: not nearly enough to buy an arsenal of large weaponry, but much more than would be required to buy all the small weaponry readily available on the black market at any given time. What havoc could an international terrorist organization wreak with the leverage that amount of money would provide? As with all Child novels, one of the major characters, albeit a background one, is the relentlessly ticking clock, and it has rarely ticked more loudly.

STREET SMARTS
Joe Ide. Remember that name. It's easy, only six letters. And IQ—while you're at it, remember that name, too. If there is ever a competition for the shortest author/title combo, this would win, hands down. But mystery aficionados will remember it as the breakout debut of a major new voice in the suspense genre. Isaiah Quintana, the titular IQ, is an unlicensed private investigator, a modern-day Easy Rawlins doing "favors for friends" at deeply discounted rates (in one case, a casserole; in another, a radial tire for his Audi). Once in a while, though, he lands a paying case, and his latest promises a fat payday upon completion, assuming that he lives to collect. His task: identify and bring to justice the party that organized an unsuccessful, albeit highly original, hit on Calvin Wright, aka rapper Black the Knife. IQ approaches problems much in the manner of Sherlock Holmes or Lincoln Rhymes, attacking it with his intellect and observation skills rather than his fists. Well, at least before using his fists. Ide is the real deal, and IQ is the best debut I've read this year.

BOSCH'S NEW VENTURE
Harry Bosch has gone through several iterations over the course of Michael Connelly's iconic series: L.A. cop; disgraced L.A. cop; widely loathed L.A. ex-cop; private cop; and now, for the time being, temp cop for the small San Fernando police department. It's an unpaid gig, but it lets Bosch keep his hand in the game. As The Wrong Side of Goodbye gathers steam, Bosch is balancing two cases: one for the SFPD, to ferret out the serial rapist known as the Screen Cutter; and one for his growing PI business, to locate a dying billionaire's last remaining heir. Although these divergent storylines have no direct correlation, they will have an impact on one another, in that they compete for Bosch's hours and attention, and both have some seriously time-sensitive and even life-threatening aspects. A segment of the narrative casts Bosch's memory back to his time spent in Vietnam during the war years, stirring up ghosts he thought were long since buried. It is a disturbing and yet cathartic tale-within-a-tale that proves once again what a master storyteller Connelly is.

TOP PICK IN MYSTERY
An amusing artifact of my last 10 years living in Tokyo: I was reading Keigo Higashino's Under the Midnight Sun, and as I got 50 or 60 pages in, I suddenly realized I knew exactly what was going to happen. This was not my imagination but rather my memory, as I had seen the 2010 Japanese film adaptation of Higashino's book. The film, titled Into the White Night, hewed remarkably closely to the book, which had not been translated into English at that time. For many—myself included—Under the Midnight Sun is Higashino's masterpiece (thus far, at least). It is the story of the 1973 killing of a smalltime Osaka pawnbroker in a derelict building; although the police have their suspicions, none of the early leads ever quite pan out. As the next 19 years unfold, related via successive narratives from a number of different characters, the primary investigator remains stymied and annoyed by his lack of success in solving the case. And then he begins to notice a disturbing trend: a series of mysterious deaths, each in some way connected to the pawnbroker's son and the chief suspect's daughter, both of whom were kids when he first met them. Under the Midnight Sun has spawned not only the aforementioned film but a TV series and a Korean movie as well. It is finally available in English, and that, folks, is a big deal.

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kirkus Reviews

Harry Bosch, balancing a new pair of gigs in greater LA, tackles two cases, one of them official, one he struggles to keep as private as can be.Now that he's settled the lawsuit he brought against the LAPD for having forced him into retirement, Harry (The Crossing, 2015, etc.) is working as an unsalaried, part-time reservist for the San Fernando Police Department while keeping his license as a private investigator. Just as the San Fernando force is decimated by the layoffs that made Harry such an attractive hire, it's confronted with a serious menace: the Screen Cutter, a serial rapist with a bizarre penchant for assaulting women during the most fertile days of their menstrual cycles. Ordinarily Harry would jump at the chance to join officers Bella Lourdes and Danny Sisto in tracking down the Screen Cutter, and he does offer one or two promising suggestions. But he's much more intent on the private job he's taken for 85-year-old engineering czar Whitney Vance, who wants him to find Vibiana Duarte, the Mexican girl he impregnated when he was a USC student, and her child, who'd be well past middle age by now—and also wants him to keep his inquiries absolutely secret. Harry's admirably dogged sleuthing soon reveals what became of Vibiana and her child, but his discovery is less interesting and challenging than his attempts to report back to his client, who doesn't answer his private phone even as everyone around Harry is demanding information about the case he doesn't feel he can share. Grade-A Connelly. The dark forces arrayed against the hero turn out to be disappointingly toothless, but everything else clicks in this latest chapter of a compulsively good cop's odyssey through the City of Angels and its outlying neighborhoods and less angelic spirits. Copyright Kirkus 2016 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Reviews

So big that Hachette allowed him a one-hour booth takeover at BookExpo America, Connelly returns with another tale featuring redoubtable detective Harry Bosch. No plot details yet, but note that 2015's The Crossing had the most preorders of any Connelly title ever. With a 550,000-copy first printing.

LJ Express Reviews

Former LAPD detective Harry Bosch is running a private investigations business and working as a volunteer detective for the tiny San Fernando Police Department (SFPD) when he is summoned to the home of billionaire Whitney Vance. Nearing the end of his life, the octogenarian tells a story of young love, an unexpected pregnancy, and a relationship cut short by Vance's father. The old man has decided that rather than leave his fortune to his company's Board of Directors, he'd rather find out if he has an heir—and that's where Bosch fits into the picture. With only a name, he sets out to determine what happened to Vance's lover and her baby. At the same time, Bosch is busy with his SFPD partner Bella Lourdes, trying to track down a serial rapist who cuts screen doors to access his victims' homes. And Harry's half-brother, attorney Mickey Haller, makes a brief crossover appearance. Verdict This solid read will please both Connelly's longtime fans and readers seeking police detective stories. [See Prepub Alert, 5/16/16.]—Vicki Briner, Broomfield, CO (c) Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Reviews

Bestseller Connolly's canny detective, Harry Bosch, remains a compelling lead, but even longtime fans may feel that his creator gives him a few too many fortuitous breaks in his 21st outing (after 2015's The Crossing). Bosch's long career with the LAPD is a thing of the past, and he now divides his time between PI work and pro bono service as a reserve police officer for the city of San Fernando. He gets involved in an apparently impossible case for an extremely wealthy client, Whitney Vance, who pays Bosch $10,000 just to agree to a meeting. The 85-year-old Vance asks Bosch to find out, in complete secrecy, what became of the woman Vance impregnated 65 years earlier and who disappeared from his life almost immediately afterward. The billionaire, who believes he is nearing his end, hopes the investigator can ascertain whether he has a living heir. Though the trail is beyond cold, Bosch lucks into a solid lead. The multiple contrivances significantly diminish the plot. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (Nov.) Copyright 2016 Publisher Weekly.