The Poet by Michael Connelly →

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Death is reporter Jack McEvoy's beat: his calling, his obsession, and we are told that right at the start. This story is about a serial killer who is cunning and brutally savage. Stephen Kings said of the book in the introduction that he wrote that the book scared him.

Jack McEvoy is a crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, and this time he is searching for information about a killer who targets homicide cops, each haunted by a murder case he couldn't crack. The killers leave a signature with each victim, a quotation from Edgar Allan Poe's works.

The latest victim is McEvoy's brother, so Jack digs even more profound, making himself so visible that he becomes a target. After much investigation, Jack concludes that his brother's death was made to look like a suicide by a serial killer.

This was the 5th book written by Michael Connelly, and it was published in 1996. It clearly shows that Connelly is a master storyteller.

Dark Sacred Night, by Michael Connelly

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A Ballard and Bosch novel with a lot of focus on LAPD Det. Renée Ballard, who works the night shift referred to as The Late Show. Ballard’s focus on her work is much like Bosch’s with high intensity. She finds Bosch looking through some old case files late one night with no one’s permission, and then she learns he is a retired LAPD working cold cases for the San Fernando PD. When he leaves, she looks at the file detailing the unsolved 2009 murder of Daisy Clayton, a 15-year-old runaway.

Ballard wants in on the cold case and begins working with Bosch. An investigation into another hard case by Bosch that involves killing a 52-year-old gang leader has put the detective marked to be killed by the violent gang Varrio San Fer 13. Bosch plays the double role of being the hunter and the hunted.

Bosch and Ballard working together, bring a new dimension to the drama and well-plotted crime investigations of Michael Connelly.

Quotes

“For every noble movement or advancement in the human endeavor across time, there were always betrayers who set everything a step back.”

“Neither spoke, neither made a sound except for the deep exhalation of breath. First, he felt her hips shudder, and soon after, he desperately reached up and pulled her into an embrace as his own body created that one moment that takes all other moments away—all fear, all sadness—and leaves just joy. Just hope. Sometimes love.”

“There was something deeply affecting about that. Something unfair went beyond the general unfairness of death at the hands of another. She wondered how men would live if they knew that their size and nature made them vulnerable to the opposite sex in every moment of their lives.”

The Drop by Michael Connelly →

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Bosch is on the DROP, which stands for Deferred Retirement Option Plan, which allows him only to work three more years but is seeking an extension to keep doing what he considers his mission in life, catching killers. The reference also seems to reference several aspects of this story; some will be more immediately recognized, like the drop of one victim from a tall building.

Bosch and his partner David Chu are working in the Open-Unsolved unit of the LAPD's homicide squad handling cold cases. They are almost desperate to get back to work when the lieutenant makes her way around the squad room like Santa Claus, parceling out the assignments like presents to the squad’s six detective teams. “Christmas came once a month in the Open-Unsolved Unit. The cold cases were the lifeblood of the unit.”

The first case is the 1989 murder of college student Lily Price who was strangled to death. DNA from a tiny blood smear on her body is matched to recently-paroled child sex abuser Clayton Pell, but Pell was only eight years old when Price died.  Bosch and Chu track Pell to a halfway house for sex offenders, where they meet therapist Hannah Stone.

Pell agrees to meet, and it is learned that during his childhood, his mother dated a man known as "Chill," who sexually abused him and beat him with a belt which could be a way his blood transferred to Price's body since it is likely that a belt was used in the strangulation.

The Price investigation has to slow down to make way for the second case, the death of attorney and business consultant George Irving, who has fallen from a hotel room balcony at Chateau Marmont. George is the son of Irvin Irving, formerly Bosch's nemesis at LAPD, now a city council member and Bosch's frequent foe in power struggles. Irving specifically requests Bosch to investigate his son's death because, despite their antipathy, he believes Bosch is a dedicated detective who will find out the truth no matter what.

As expected, Bosch solves both the cold cases by finding a deranged killer who has been loose in the city for three decades and a political conspiracy that goes back into the dark history of the police department.

A Deadly Shade Of Gold, A Travis McGee Novel, by John D. MacDonald

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A Deadly Shade of Gold was published in 1965 and was the fifth novel in the Travis McGee series by John D. MacDonald. The introduction is by Lee Child, whose Jack Reacher character reminds us of Travis McGee.

Child’s introduction tells us, “Suspense Fiction trades on surprising and unexpected twists,” and as a master of this type of fiction himself, his comment has extra meaning. It is also no surprise to find on page one under a “Praise for John D. MacDonald, the first comment from Dean Koontz where he says, “My favorite novelist of all time.”

In this story, McGee’s old friend Sam Taggart drops in unexpectedly after being gone for years to visit both McGee and his old girlfriend, Nora, in Florida. He tells McGee about a group of solid gold Aztec idols that Sam is trying to get away with, but he is murdered in a vicious late-night knife attack before he even has a chance to see Nora, who still is in love with him.

McGee and Nora team up and are obsessed with vengeance and set out to find the killer and regain the gold. Their chase leads to a Mexican town full of American expatriates off the West Coast. McGee becomes closely involved with several beautiful and fascinating women on the quest to get the gold.

Quotes from this Book

“I do not like the killers, and the killing bravely and well crap. I do not like the bully boys, the Teddy Roosevelt’s, the Hemingways, the Ruarks. They are merely slightly more sophisticated versions of the New Jersey file clerks who swarm into the Adirondacks in the fall, in red cap, beard stubble, and taut hero’s grin, talking out of the side of their mouths, exuding fumes of bourbon, come to slay the ferocious white-tailed deer. It is the search for balls. A man should have one chance to bring something down. He should have his shot at something, a shining running something, and see it come a-tumbling down, all mucus and steaming blood stench and excrement, the eyes going dull during the final muscle spasms. And if he is, in all parts and purposes, a man, he will file that away as a part of his process of growth and life and eventual death. And if he is perpetually, hopelessly a boy, he will lust to do it again, with a bigger beast.”

“That is the flaw in my personality. Vanity. And your flaw is sentimentality. They are the flaws which will inevitably kill us both.”

“The Only Thing in the World Worth a Damn is the Strange, Touching, Pathetic, Awesome Nobility of the Individual Human Spirit.”