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ericwelch 's review for:
Angels Flight
by Michael Connelly
This has to be the best Harry Bosch novel of a very good series, and it is read by one of my favorites, Dick Hill, to boot. The great thing about Connelly’s hard-boiled police procedural series is that you get a real sense of detection as Harry and his partners, Ryder and Edgar, collect clues and then put them together.
This particular case is incendiary. Howard Elias, a black civil rights attorney, is perhaps the LAPD’s most hated man in Los Angeles. He has made a practice of filing brutality suits against police officers. So when Bosch is pulled off his normal rotation and asked to head the investigation only to learn that the victim is Howard Elias, he realizes this will be an especially difficult case since the black community will assume a policeman killed Elias. Elias had been working on the “Black Warrior” case, in which a black man accused of the heinous murder of a small girl had been found innocent. Michael Harries, the accused, had charged the LAPD with torturing him in an attempt to get a confession (Black Warrior was the brand name of the LAPD’s pencils and it was alleged that Frank Sheehan, Bosch’s old partner, was one of those wielding the pencil that was inserted into Harris’s ears.
Another difficulty is that Harry is assigned his old nemesis Chastain, an IAD detective who has crossed swords with Harry before. Harry soon realizes that the evidence has been tampered with, and the upper echelon brass are looking for a scapegoat to prevent the city, fresh from the Rodney King incidents, from descending into more riots. Harry’s year-old marriage, to a former FBI agent, is unraveling as Eleanor leaves home, addicted to gambling casinos. Harry has many of his cherished assumptions overturned as he unravels this case, despite pressure from above, and the ultimate outcome reflects Connelly’s pure cynicism.
All of Connelly’s books are excellent, but in this, he has outdone himself. I found myself arriving home, reluctant to turn off the tape, sitting in the driveway as more details were revealed.
This particular case is incendiary. Howard Elias, a black civil rights attorney, is perhaps the LAPD’s most hated man in Los Angeles. He has made a practice of filing brutality suits against police officers. So when Bosch is pulled off his normal rotation and asked to head the investigation only to learn that the victim is Howard Elias, he realizes this will be an especially difficult case since the black community will assume a policeman killed Elias. Elias had been working on the “Black Warrior” case, in which a black man accused of the heinous murder of a small girl had been found innocent. Michael Harries, the accused, had charged the LAPD with torturing him in an attempt to get a confession (Black Warrior was the brand name of the LAPD’s pencils and it was alleged that Frank Sheehan, Bosch’s old partner, was one of those wielding the pencil that was inserted into Harris’s ears.
Another difficulty is that Harry is assigned his old nemesis Chastain, an IAD detective who has crossed swords with Harry before. Harry soon realizes that the evidence has been tampered with, and the upper echelon brass are looking for a scapegoat to prevent the city, fresh from the Rodney King incidents, from descending into more riots. Harry’s year-old marriage, to a former FBI agent, is unraveling as Eleanor leaves home, addicted to gambling casinos. Harry has many of his cherished assumptions overturned as he unravels this case, despite pressure from above, and the ultimate outcome reflects Connelly’s pure cynicism.
All of Connelly’s books are excellent, but in this, he has outdone himself. I found myself arriving home, reluctant to turn off the tape, sitting in the driveway as more details were revealed.