Book review: Can’t put the cosh on Bosch

Michael Connelly delivers yet another pulsating crime thriller that continues his trend of quality. File picture: David Livingston/Getty Images

• The Waiting 
• Michael Connelly 
• Orion, €26.45 

Michael Connelly is the doyen of crime fiction. Born in Philadelphia to a family of Irish descent, his novels have sold more than 85m copies worldwide.

The 68-year-old is best known for the Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer series.

The author’s debut, The Black Echo (1992), introduced Bosch, Connelly’s most enduring character throughout his 39 novels.

For seven seasons starting in 2014, Amazon Prime streamed Bosch — a TV series based on the books.

A detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, he now has cancer and is a minor character in The Waiting. 

The protagonist is Renée Ballard. She heads the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit and reluctantly approaches Bosch.

“I need help, Harry. And I think you’re the only one I can trust.”

Ballard’s unit examines cold murder cases, dating back to 1960, by applying new forensic technology to identify suspects. 

A recent DNA sample transforms one of their most gruesome unsolved cases: A serial rapist and murderer who terrified LA across five years, two decades prior.

The DNA sample matches that of the so-called Pillowcase Rapist. However, it came from a 23-year-old man — signalling his father was the perpetrator.

The man’s father is Jonathan Purcell, the presiding judge of the LA superior court. Purcell was appointed to the bench the year the Pillowcase Rapist went inactive.

Following this lead poses Ballard an incendiary dilemma and requires untangling a complex web of secrets. The novel’s subplot revolves around the theft of Ballard’s gun and police ID.

Believing her antagonists in the LAPD would use the burglary as a pretext for removing her from the Open-Unsolved Unit, Ballard doesn’t report the incident. 

However, this decision has far-reaching consequences. When Ballard’s ID comes into the possession of a terrorist planning a mass shooting, she risks permanently losing her badge.

A hallmark of Connelly’s fiction is incorporating real-world events into his novels. In The Waiting, the terrorist is wanted for his role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol.

Likewise, the 2023 wildfires in Hawaii directly affect Ballard: Six months after the inferno, her mother remains listed as missing.

Connelly was inspired to be a crime novelist after seeing the film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. 

Ballard fits the mould of Chandler’s emblematic hard-boiled detective, Philip Marlowe, but Connelly complicates this by portraying his protagonist as committed to unravelling her anxieties.

When Ballard was 14, she was abandoned by her mother. The detective’s therapist, Dr Elingburg, suggests Ballard masks this anguish by taking on the trauma of others through her work. 

When Ballard outlines her work on cold cases as a “dig down into the past”, Elingburg replies they’re taking the same approach in the therapy room.

That sense of harmony runs through the book like a watermark. After Ballard narrowly avoids being discovered by a suspect while searching his van, Bosch suggests: “Luck is a fluid thing.”

Later, when both detectives sift through the suspect’s security storage room, Ballard echoes Bosch’s sentiments almost exactly (“Luck is fluid.”).

Similarly, just as Bosch mentored Ballard, she is now mentoring Harry’s daughter, Maddie, the newest recruit to the unit.

“You’re like my dad when he was on a case,” Maddie tells Ballard. “Driven. Nothing else mattered.”

Laced with fraught interrogations and tense action sequences, the plot requires Ballard to navigate the treacherous political scheming of the LAPD, the DA, and the FBI.

Unfolding over two frenetic weeks and written in Connelly’s trademark present tense, dialogue-heavy style, not a word is wasted in the 400 pages of this fleet-footed, pulsating crime thriller.

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