Michael Connelly – The Black Ice (Harry Bosch #2)
I am really slow in catching up on Harry Bosch. While the tv shows I enjoyed as soon as they were out, following up on books gets harder (not only with Harry). So this is the second book on him by Michael Connelly, actually published in the past millenium. And while I was already a grown up in those days, it still feels strange, missing all the modern technology like, e.g., mobile phones. So they relied on pagers in the books instead. People where harder to reach and callers even easer to ignore. Well, I am drifting off.
“The Black Ice” refers to some highly addictive and dangerous (fictional) drug invented by Mexicans to outsmart the Hawaiian drug kartell. Bosch finds about it while investigating some murders and especially the death of a detective he earlier contacted for some information. While the upper ranks, like Irving, try to put the events under cover as quick as possible, Bosch, as we know him, “can’t let go” and picks up one stone after the other to reveal the truth behind all the bodies left on the street. In contrast to the tv series, Bosch is mainly on his own in this story (although Jerry Edgar does appear and is of help). He even does a stint to Mexico to solve the crimes in cooperation with the FBI.
I love the pace of Connelly’s novels. Even with the charme of the 1990s it still makes a great crime book, story-wise as well as character-wise. Everyone on the book feels so real that you get the idea of sitting right on Harry’s should riding along. The storyline was great, with a driven Bosch hunting the truth. I got the ending wrong around and quite late by that, so it was a double surprise to me. And I hope to get on with book 3 sooner than in about a year. But the stack of unread is high.