Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellant debut of a fascinating character, 23 Dec 2002
I've been reading the later Harry Bosch novels, and just ran into this one. It probably would've been much better had it been the first Bosch novel I had read, but it's still darn good.
The plot elements have been used before, but they're given a fresh twist here. Harry in this book as in the later ones has three distinct challenges: The case itself, and this is one in which he's coincidentally deeply involved; the continual conflict with the political agendas of superiors which threatens his ability to properly investigate the case; and the dealing with his own deep feelings and realizations, including his awareness that his decisions affect lives of those not directly involved.While some may find the beginning slow, I find Connelly highly skilled in bringing out important technical aspects of the investigation while interspersing scenes that involve more action. If you haven't yet read Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch stories, this is the one to start with. And if you have, be sure not to miss this one.
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Debut for a Great Character, 8 Jan 2004
Michael Connelly's first novel introduces us LAPD Detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch. Bosch had formerly been a member of the LAPD's elite RHD (Robbery Homicide Division), but roughly a year before this book begins he killed a suspect in the Dollmaker Case. As a result, Bosch was investigated by IAD (the Internal Affairs Department) and was suspended for a month and demoted to robbery-homicide team of the Hollywood Division. As it happens, IAD weren't entirely happy with this outcome, and are waiting for their chance to get Bosch out of the police force altogether. Malicious ? They make the 'real' villains look good. Bosch proves to be an interesting character. With a reputation as being something of a loner, he's a jazz fan with a taste for coffee, beer and cigarettes. He then served in Vietnam as a Tunnel Rat, before returning home and joining the Police Force. It's Harry's time as a Tunnel Rat that comes back to haunt him in The Black Echo. The book begins with Harry being called out to Mulholland Dam, where a body's been found in drainage pipe. Dismissed by other officers at the scene as simply another drug user who'd accidentally overdosed - and therefore, not needing any further investigation - Bosch isn't quite so and decides to run with it. Things take a more personal twist when he recognises the corpse as a fellow Tunnel Rat, Billy Meadows. Things start looking more and more like Meadows was murdered - an autopsy seems to indicate he'd been tortured before he died, while a pawn ticket found in Meadows' apartment links him to a major bank heist carried out the previous year. This bank job is officially being investigated by the FBI and, as Bosch believes the men behind the bank job are also behind Meadows' death, he arranges a meeting with Special Agent Eleanor Wish. Harry's intention was to request a sharing of information but he doesn't exactly get what he wants out of the meeting - and things haven't finished going downhill for him. Connolly's style of writing is excellent - a former Police Reporter with the LA Times, I would assume there is a great deal of accuracy in his portrayal of a homicide investigation. He has created a very likeable character in Harry Bosch, while his descriptions of the city have left me feeling like I know LA. Definitely worth reading !
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This is where greatness began, 25 Jun 2007
As of the date of this review, Michael Connelly has written and published eighteen fictional novels of which thirteen feature LAPD Detective Harry Bosch. It all began back in 1992 with The Black Echo but if, like many, you have discovered Connelly by way of his more recent stories, then do not for one minute think that back then he was just a beginner learning his trade and his debut novel should be considered with caution. No, quite simply if you like Connelly today then you will like Connelly `then' just as much.
This is despite the fact that it's a tale of events in the early 1990s with heavy references to events of the early 1970s. More specifically, Bosch is a Los Angeles detective turning 40 with powerful memories of his experiences as a tunnel rat in Vietnam some twenty years earlier and from which the title of this novel draws its name. But the drawing of the characters and their relationships with one another is of high quality, a skill which, in my humble opinion, only a minority of Connelly's peers in the field of crime thrillers pull off as successfully as he does. In any thriller series this is the element that probably defines success or failure more than any other, and since Connelly has been writing tales surrounding Bosch for over fifteen years, it's safe to assume that he's cracked this difficult task and he demonstrates this from the word go in his debut novel.
Having already read the outstanding Concrete Blonde (the third in the Bosch series) it's sometimes amusing to read the occasional mentions of the career-defining experiences of the case built around the pursuit of the Dollmaker; amusing because Connelly decided never to write the story itself, yet the events of that case are cleverly used to help shape our understanding of Bosch's personality in small doses in The Black Echo and I am sure that he always planned to build a story around it for The Concrete Blonde two years later. To me that says much about the forward-thinking, the creativity and the plain confidence of the author.
It's easy to summarise this story's plot - the body of a man is found and Bosch, by chance, is assigned to the case to find the man's killer or killers. It's not long before Bosch brings about an association with the dead man (a Vietnam tunnel rat who worked with Bosch two decades earlier) to an audacious bank robbery the previous summer and a similar heist that is planned for the imminent future. Bosch has it all figured out, and has to solve all this is in the midst of an Internal Affairs investigation coupled with high-level corruption among those who might have a vested interest in the two bank robberies. The story covers about one week, my one criticism being the absence of any chapters and the use, instead, of rather long `parts' which for people like myself who often read books in snatches of thirty minutes at a time, can be slightly irritating. Anyone who invests lengthy periods of time to reading won't mind at all, I'm sure.
All I can say as a lover of crime fiction and a fan of good series creators such as Val McDermid, John Connolly, Mo Hayder and Mark Billingham (and the owner of pretty much everything written by Deaver, Cornwell, Slaughter, Reichs, Gerritsen, Coben, Rankin and Child), is that Michael Connelly is surely and deservedly right up there with the best of them and this debut novel is a must-read for anyone who has read and enjoyed his more recent work. It's real quality.
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