Desert Star – Michael Connolly

Desert Star is the latest Michael Connolly novel in the Harry Bosch series.

Harry Bosch was in previous novels a left-field Los Angeles police detective.  Now retired, aged 70, he joins the unsolved crime unit run by current detective Renee Ballard.

They investigate two crimes.

One is the murder of a whole family in the desert. Whilst in the force, Bosch had the conduct of the investigation and believed he knows the perp.

The second is of a young woman, sister of a politician, and the perp is traced to his campaign team.

It’s old fashioned detective work: following up clues, hunches that some witnesses are not telling the truth and identifying the constraints – chiefly the law within which a successful investigation must operate.

Harry Bosch is an intriguing figure. A veteran from the Vietnam War, he frequently is in conflict with “Authority”. Yet you know his persistence and methods will unmask the killer.

Connolly has a problem – the same as Philip Kerr had in the Bernie Gunther series.

Gunther was the ‘good German’ policeman – not a Nazi ideologue – who first appeared in the March Violet series.

He was perhaps a surprise success but the detective acquired a readership.

As a result its creator Kerr had to give him a post-WW2 life in Cuba and the South of France, working as detective in the Grand Hotel du Cap Ferrat.

Incidentally Kerr wrote a novel based on the Tehran Conference of 1943 – Hitler’s Peace – an event covered in a recent non-fictional work by two American historians Brad Meltzer and Josh Mensch.

My notes on the Kerr novel are that it was not feasible that there might be an assassination attempt upon Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt (Meltzer and Mensch postulate a similar theory), but Kerr’s novel was readable.

Kerr has now passed on.

Will Connolly continue to write Bosch novels given that he has now retired?

One way that he could do so would be for Bosch to advise Renee Ballard.

Connolly, like Kerr, possesses descriptive powers which extend to characterisation and location.

If he has a weakness it is dialogue – frequently using common parlance such as “Roger that/I’m on it” but that does give a certain authenticity, be it repetitive …