A review by batrock
The Concrete Blonde by Michael Connelly

4.0

The third Bosch, and already our man is returning to the well that saw him busted down to Hollywood before the series even began. The Concrete Blonde is Connelly’s most complex Bosch to date, full of premature accusations, multiple credible suspects, and several blind alleys. It represents a maturation of the man’s craft, while also leaning very hard into the genre hallmarks of the nineties thriller in the best possible way.

Bosch is being sued by the widow of the Dollmaker, the alleged serial killer that he shot in self defence, who turned out to have been reaching for the toupée under his pillow (in many ways, these early books are very nineties). As the case is underway, a note purporting to be from the Dollmaker turns up a body that the dead man could not have possibly killed. In between court appearances Bosch must clandestinely hunt this new killer while making sure that he put down the right man in the first place.

The first thing to note about The Concrete Blonde is that Bosch can’t sleep inappropriately with a coworker or someone involved in the case because he’s still sleeping with the inappropriate pick up from The Black Ice. You might not think it, but that’s actually a huge relief to the running of the story. It means that his distraction is about what he is or isn’t saying to the woman waiting for him at home, not actually interfering with him conducting his job. Of course, he’s supposed to be on leave to deal with the court case rather than chasing leads, but it’s best not to go there.

Connelly is somewhat clear-eyed about public levels of distrust for the police department and the depths of its corruption, but it always feels like this is lip service for an author who has to keep the police onside so that he can keep telling these stories. It’s been bubbling along since the beginning, and it likely will for the entire series, but it’s particularly pronounced in this one, when Bosch’s own conduct is literally on trial. It’s the standard experience of almost anyone with a social conscience reading a crime novel in the current era, and Connelly is, at the very least, not fascist about it.

Bosch commits one of his classic sins, which is to be gung-ho about accusing someone of being the criminal, but at least this time it’s not someone that he’s sleeping with, and he doesn’t burn too many bridges. Yet Connelly folds multiple crimes into the fray, and they’re not all related, into the sort of cosmic gumbo that Lieutenant Crashmore himself would be proud to solve. Both of the predecessors to The Concrete Blonde were quite good, The Black Echo’s convolutions notwithstanding, but this one really does seem like it’s on another level already. The thing is that you like the man, and a fictional character doesn’t have to be held to the exact standards of a real person (Bosch would be a nightmare in his job to all sides of the equation: fellow officers, civilians, and criminals alike).

Connelly is still in the process of fine tuning the cast, some in positive directions, others less so, but it pretty much all works. The downhill run to the solution is so tautly plotted that you can forgive Bosch for so often fingering the wrong guy (so to speak) because the outcome is so satisfying, no matter how extreme.

With The Concrete Blonde’s multilayered approach to constructing a crime, Michael Connelly continues hitting his stride. It’s possible that he’ll hit a wall somewhere along the way, but maybe these things are consistent along 38 titles. With a long running series that has managed to endure more than thirty years, it’s fun to be able to track the evolution of a character; as a man who ages and changes with the time, Bosch is the perfect candidate if you’re looking for a detective, you’ve exhausted all of the Rebuses, and you’re okay with his slightly outré approach to the profession.