Echo Park

(Little, Brown, 405 pagesHARRY Bosch, the protagonist of Michael Connelly’s wildly popular police procedurals, is a reckless, violent, paranoid, vengeful, brooding, insubordinate, self-destructive loner.He disdains authority. He is obsessed with justice. He believes only he can speak for the dead.

You might compare him to Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, or Bruce Willis’ John McClane, but Bosch is more complex and a lot more interesting.

Echo Park <$>is Connelly’s (pictured)<\p><$f"FranklinGothic-DemiCond">17th crime novel, and the 12th featuring Bosch. At 56, the Los Angeles cop may have slowed a step, but he certainly hasn’t mellowed. He’s a detective in the Open-Unsolved Unit now, and he’s obsessed with the 13-year-old disappearance of a young woman named Marie Gesto.

“Each time he would work on the case for a week or so, hit the wall and return the file to the Archives, thinking he had done all that could be done. But the absolution only lasted a few months and then there he was at the counter filling out the file request form again.”

The only clue, and it wasn’t much of one, was the woman’s clothes, folded neatly and left on the front seat of her car, which was found abandoned in an unused garage in the High Tower Apartments near the Hollywood Bowl.

The building is a real place. Raymond Chandler, one of the originators of the hard-boiled crime genre, lived there for a time, and director Robert Altman made it the home of Chandler’s private eye, Philip Marlowe, in his 1973 film version of The Long Goodbye<$>.

Bosch thinks Gesto was kidnapped and murdered by Anthony Garland, the creepy son of a wealthy oil baron, but he’s never had enough evidence for an arrest.

Now, out of the blue, cops pull over a suspicious van in the Echo Park neighbourhood. Inside, they find two dismembered bodies.

The driver, Raynard Waits, says two bodies are just part of his handiwork. He offers to confess to nine more murders if they agree to spare him the death penalty. One of the cases: Marie Gesto.

Rick O’Shea (Bosch mockingly calls him ricochet), a headline-grabbing prosecutor, leaps at the deal. But Bosch is sceptical of Waits’ story — even after he leads police to Gesto’s body. For Bosch, there are too many loose ends, too many things that don’t quite add up.

So, he makes trouble.

His partner, Kiz Rider, fears he will go down in flames and take her with him. A fellow officer, Freddy Olivas, calls him a hothead. His lover, Rachel Walling, thinks he’s going to get himself killed. His former boss, Irving Irving, now a civilian running for the City Council, says he represents everything that’s wrong with the Los Angeles Police Department.

Bosch doesn’t much care what any of them think. When it comes right down to it, he trusts no one but himself.

“To Bosch,” Connelly tells us, “it seemed that as far back as you could remember in L.A., the fix was always in.”

So he attacks the case the only way he knows how — with all the finesse of a sledgehammer.

The result is another suspenseful, fast-paced Bosch page turner, written in Connelly’s familiar, vivid and unadorned style.