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The Black Box (A Harry Bosch Novel, 16) Hardcover – November 26, 2012
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In this "superb" thriller, Detective Harry Bosch links the bullet from a recent crime to the unsolved killing of a young female photographer during the 1992 L.A. riots (Wall Street Journal).
In a case that spans 20 years, Harry Bosch links the bullet from a recent crime to a file from 1992, the killing of a young female photographer during the L.A. riots. Harry originally investigated the murder, but it was then handed off to the Riot Crimes Task Force and never solved.
Now Bosch's ballistics match indicates that her death was not random violence, but something more personal, and connected to a deeper intrigue. Like an investigator combing through the wreckage after a plane crash, Bosch searches for the "black box," the one piece of evidence that will pull the case together.
Riveting and relentlessly paced, The Black Box leads Harry Bosch, "one of the greats of crime fiction" (New York Daily News), into one of his most fraught and perilous cases.
- Print length416 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherLittle, Brown and Company
- Publication dateNovember 26, 2012
- Dimensions6 x 1.06 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-100316069434
- ISBN-13978-0316069434
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#1 New York Times Bestselling Author
Editorial Reviews
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Review
"Connelly inherits the mantle of Raymond Chandler.... Their books share a kind of ambitious artistry that strains to reach beyond genre fiction."―Chuck Leddy, Boston Globe
"Connelly is superb at building suspense."―Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal
"Bosch is one of the best detectives in crime fiction, and Connelly continues to amaze with his latest effort."―Jeff Ayers, Associated Press
"Starts with a bang and stays strong all the way through."―Janet Maslin, New York Times
"Connelly's lean, just-the-facts style makes for crisp dialogue and a brisk, info-driven plot....A haunted quality has always been one of the chief attractions of Connelly's series and of Bosch's character."―Art Taylor, Washington Post
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Product details
- Publisher : Little, Brown and Company; First Edition - First Printing (November 26, 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0316069434
- ISBN-13 : 978-0316069434
- Item Weight : 1.45 pounds
- Dimensions : 6 x 1.06 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #127,342 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,946 in Murder Thrillers
- #3,425 in Police Procedurals (Books)
- #9,547 in Suspense Thrillers
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Michael Connelly is the bestselling author of more than thirty novels and one work of nonfiction. With over eighty-five million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into forty-five foreign languages, he is one of the most successful writers working today. A former newspaper reporter who worked the crime beat at the Los Angeles Times and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Connelly has won numerous awards for his journalism and his fiction. His very first novel, The Black Echo, won the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly's 1998 novel, Blood Work. In March 2011, the movie adaptation of his #1 bestselling novel, The Lincoln Lawyer, hit theaters worldwide starring Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller. His most recent New York Times bestsellers include Desert Star (2022), The Dark Hours (2021), The Law Of Innocence (2020), Fair Warning (2020), and The Night Fire (2019). Michael is the executive producer of Bosch and Bosch: Legacy, Amazon Studios original drama series based on his bestselling character Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver and streaming on Amazon Prime/Amazon Freevee. He is the executive producer of The Lincoln Lawyer, streaming on Netflix, starring Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. He is also the executive producer of the documentary films, "Sound Of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story' and 'Tales Of the American.' He spends his time in California and Florida.
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The Bosch books (Connelly also writes legal thrillers featuring an attorney named Mickey Haller, including The Lincoln Lawyer, on which the film starring Matthew McConaughey was based) fall into the classic police procedural category, a genre that begins with the protagonist (usually a detective of police) being assigned to a case (usually a murder) and investigating it, step-by-step, until the malefactor is arrested or otherwise brought to justice.
True to this form, in The Black Box Bosch fights departmental indifference, a hostile and essentially imbecilic supervisor, an internal affairs investigation and a crooked law enforcement executive while methodically investigating the coldest of cold cases: the execution-style murder of a Danish freelance reporter and photographer during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
The hero of this novel has the virtue of verisimilitude: Unlike Child, whose hero, Jack Reacher, is a superman, genius and expert marksman, Connelly keeps his action believable by presenting a protagonist who is a somewhat creaky police veteran close to retirement age. Harry Bosch makes deductive mistakes and sometimes misses clues or misinterprets them. Although he is a good marksman with his handgun, he can’t free himself from bonds by brute strength, or overcome a half-dozen villains in hand-to-hand combat; in one section of this novel, he exhausts himself simply by walking through a muddy orchard after nightfall.
Black Box author Michael Connelly uses police jargon sparingly
but to great effect.
What’s more, Bosch sounds like the cop he is. Connelly uses police jargon sparingly, but the terminology he inserts in his dialog has the ring of authenticity. His other characters also have unique voices.
Consider the section of the book when Bosch takes his teenage daughter, a handgun enthusiast, to the police range for simulated "shoot-don’t-shoot" exercises. Both Bosch and the range master are jazz fans, and their discussion of different musicians seems as natural and credible as the technical terminology they use to discuss the simulations Bosch and his daughter face.
And although the musical discussion turns on artists who are probably unknown to the average reader, Connelly makes it easy to follow and the interchange helps to establish Bosch and his police chum as real people with interests outside their jobs as cops.
Compare this to the stultifying Popular Mechanics approach Lee Child uses in the Reacher books, each of which contains thousands of words of technical readout about guns and ammunition that do little to push the story forward or make Reacher seem like a real flesh-and-blood individual.
Connelly also manages to cover the procedural bases of his novel by recapping his protagonist’s investigative techniques, explaining what he does and why without suffocating readers with too many boring details, dead ends and bum tips.
He skillfully adds texture and depth to his story by giving us glimpses into Bosch’s fitful romantic life, his relationship with his daughter and his interaction with his departmental co-workers, but he doesn’t overwhelm us with personal details that pull us away from the mystery his detective is trying to solve.
In other words, everything in The Black Box is there for a reason, which adds to the satisfaction the reader feels when the climax occurs.
And not every loose end is neatly tied up at the end of the book: enough strands are still trailing that the reader actually hopes some of them will be taken in hand in the next installment of the Bosch saga. For instance, when we finish the last page of this novel, we are unsure how Bosch will manage to recover a working relationship with his moronic boss and whether he will somehow patch up his romantic entanglement with the social worker he has been dating. Most intriguingly, we never find out why internal affairs Detective Nancy Mendenhall, the investigator who has been probing misconduct allegations against Bosch, takes critical actions that put her on the scene at the novel’s denouement.
(To discuss Mendenhall’s role in too much detail would raise spoilers, but suffice to say her actions remain a mystery when the book is over, and I, for one, suspect we are going to see more of her in future Bosch thrillers.)
The police procedural style has yielded a large number of popular crime classics, among which are the 87th Precinct stories by Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), gritty LAPD detective novels by Joseph Wambaugh such as The Blue Knight and The Choirboys, the Jim Cree/Joe Leaphorn tribal police stories of Tony Hillerman, tales involving Martin Cruz Smith’s politically incorrect Russian militsia detective, Arkady Renko, and the Martin Beck series by husband and wife team Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo.
Because they closely adhere to established investigative techniques and often feature them as a key element of the narrative, procedural novels have gained sufficient international popularity to allow the main characters to be shifted out of their native countries in motion pictures based on them.
For example, Sjowall and Wahloo’s protagonist in The Laughing Policeman, Martin Beck, became Jake Martin, a San Francisco detective in Stuart Rosenberg’s 1973 film version; and Hunter’s 87th Precinct investigators from the novel King’s Ransom (1959) were transformed into a Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department team investigating a kidnaping in Akira Kurosawa’s 1963 movie, High and Low.
But one of the things I most enjoy about procedurals is that they frequently fit into the red noir category of literature that I have discussed in some of my earlier essays: thrillers that serve up a critique of modern capitalist society while masquerading as entertaining genre fiction.
The Black Box certainly fits this pattern: Bosch’s investigation uncovers corruption in high places as well as the use of corporate profits to buy influence and political power. A public servant is unmasked as an assassin who serves as a hired thug for a twisted businessman. While he is trying to ferret out the truth, Bosch suffers interference from a departmental superior who could be a pointy-haired boss right out of the comic strip, Dilbert. In fact, his immediate boss, Lieutenant O’Toole, is a living example of the Peter Principle: managers tend to receive promotions until they reach their level of maximum incompetence.
Bosch even runs afoul of the LAPD’s chief of police, who inserts himself in the case for political reasons in a way that threatens the detective’s ability to close it with a definitive solution after two decades. Through all this capitalist corruption and administrative ineptitude, Bosch soldiers on, the rumpled knight without illusions that Raymond Chandler wrote about in his 1950 essay, “The Simple Art of Murder:”
“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.”
That brief passage describes Michael Connelly’s detective, Harry Bosch, perfectly. I feel better for having had the opportunity to meet him in The Black Box, and I look forward to a long and satisfying friendship with him in the future.
On the second to last page Connelly wrote "She would not tell Bosch why she ..." did something. That bothered me. It was important. I hope he answers it in the next book. But I have to wait a year? I believe the author said he was late finishing this book. Maybe that's why he left it unexplained.
The positive:
One of the things he does so well is: When Harry first starts a case, I'm thinking how can he possibly solve this? How will he find anything? What can he do? Then he finds one small piece of something and follows it. He gathers a couple more odd pieces of information and I'm still thinking how could he possibly ever solve this? Even later in the book, I'm still thinking that. Yes this is a mystery slowly uncovering evidence. But Connelly does it in a special way which is not predictable and keeps me wondering. That's a neat talent. I was immersed all the way through. I didn't want to stop reading. At the end the mystery was solved, but I wanted to see what Harry would do next. I wanted to continue reading about Harry's life which I guess is the next book - next year. So, it was done before I was ready to be done. But I suppose that's good.
DATA:
Narrative mode: 3rd person. Story length: 403 pages. Swearing language: strong, including religious swear words, but not often used. Sexual content: none. Setting: 1992 and 2012 California. Copyright: 2012. Genre: crime mystery with a little suspense.
OTHER BOOKS - FOUR SERIES (Bosch, McEvoy, McCaleb, Haller):
I recommend reading the Harry Bosch books in order, but it would be ok to try "The Last Coyote" or "Lost Light" first, just to see if you like the style. Then go back and read the rest in order. Following is my recommended reading order. I've included four series within this list because there is a date flow and the characters interact. All of these books could be read as stand-alones, but reading them in order provides richer character development.
3 stars. The Black Echo (Bosch #1)
3 ½ stars. The Black Ice (Bosch #2)
4 stars. The Concrete Blonde (Bosch #3)
5 stars. The Last Coyote (Bosch #4)
4 stars. Trunk Music (Bosch #5)
4 stars. Angels Flight (Bosch #6)
4 ½ stars. Blood Work (McCaleb #1) Bosch is not in this.
3 ½ stars. A Darkness More Than Night (McCaleb #2) (Bosch #7) McCaleb is the primary investigator, but he interacts with Bosch.
3 ½ stars. City Of Bones (Bosch #8)
5 stars. Lost Light (Bosch #9)
5 stars. The Poet (McEvoy #1) Bosch is not in this. Read this any time before "The Narrows."
4 stars. The Narrows (sequel to The Poet) (Bosch #10) Bosch is the main investigator.
3 stars. The Closers (Bosch #11)
3 ½ stars. Echo Park (Bosch #12)
4 stars. The Overlook (short, half-length) (Bosch #13)
4 ½ stars. The Lincoln Lawyer (Haller #1) Bosch is not in this.
4 stars. The Brass Verdict (Haller #2) (Bosch #14) Bosch has a small part in this.
4 ½ stars. Nine Dragons. (Bosch #15) Haller has a small part in this.
3 stars. The Reversal. (Haller #3) (Bosch #16) Mostly Haller. Bosch has a secondary role.
3 stars. The Fifth Witness (Haller #4)
5 stars. The Drop (Bosch #17)
5 stars. The Black Box (Bosch #18)
5 stars. The Gods of Guilt (Haller #5)
Top reviews from other countries
Bosch’s best qualities are his relentlessness and his focus. But he also is a very caring person. This is shown by his relationships in that he cares deeply about those he becomes involved with, lovers, his exwife, partners and other coworkers, but his own paranoialike distrust leads him to sabotage these relationships. The only pure relationship to this point is with his daughter who loves unconditionally. It is edifying that one who has seen so much ugliness can retain the capacity for this. harry has his demons but he is still able to control them.
I highly recommend this series. There are 20 novels and a few short stories. Many times I will start a novel series, read a few, get worn out and move to a new novel or series then eventually come back. With Bosch I have not felt this. Bosch is too compelling. Too relatable. I need to know what’s next.
Without Bosch this self isolation would be unbearable.
Thank you Mr. Connelly.
毎回、期待を裏切らないコナリーの才能は枯れることはない様子。
定年延長もあと5年、65才のボッシュ刑事。マディ巡査???
早く、次作を読みたい。