The Narrows
Harry Bosch #10
By Michael Connelly

      Michael Connelly here proves he’s one of the top crime fiction writers around. In The Narrows, he’s unquestionably at the top of his game. His superior intelligence is everywhere in evidence—in superb plotting, assured style and solid characters. The climax of this terrific thriller is breathtaking and the momentum of the story leading up to it is pitch perfect. It doesn’t get any better than this.

   Connelly is clever in any number of ways. One of them is to converge the stories of both his long-standing series character, Harry Bosch, with that of Rachel Walling, the female protagonist of two of his more recent novels, including The Poet. This is a masterful stroke; one of the characters is a PI who’s shunned by the police; the other, an ostracized FBI agent assigned to the Dakotas for a couple of years, as out of the way as it gets in FBI-land. When these two work together to track down the re-emerged Poet, they understand each other implicitly, and so their combined efforts mean even more to the reader than they would otherwise.

   Another, possibly even slyer, conceit that Connelly pulls off is the fusing of reality and fiction. At first, the reader may think the author is tooting his own horn to the point of overkill as he more than once alludes to his own Blood Work, the basis of the film starring Clint Eastwood. How bloated can this writer’s ego be? But reading further in the novel, you see Connelly referring to Dean Koontz, Ian Rankin, and George Pelecanos in smart, sneaky ways, as well as to one of the characters in The Narrows being present for the interview of notorious serial killer Ted Bundy—and you realize Connelly is having a lot of fun mixing it up. What’s real and what isn’t? Could these things actually happen to you or me? When The Poet, Bob Backus, sees agent Rachel Walling reading a novel called The Poet (written, of course, by Connelly), this fusing of fiction and reality reaches the pinnacle of cleverness. It’s understanding why Connelly is doing something like this that makes this so much fun.

     Backus has killed again and in so doing, has brought Walling out to a remote spot in southern California. Through a completely different set of circumstances, Bosch finds himself in the same place, asked by McCaleb’s widow to investigate the death of his former colleague, Terry McCaleb (the main character in Blood Work). Once these two meet, the story gets going in earnest and there’s non-stop intensity from there on. Highly recommended and although it’s only May, I’d be surprised if this did not turn out to be one of the best thrillers of the year.

Reviews of other titles in the Bosch Series