Ironwood is Michael Connelly’s latest, and it’s billed Catalina #2, starring Detective Sergeant Stilwell, who is now further along into his career as head of the sheriff’s department substation on that island off the coast of Los Angeles County, but it’s a combo cast, since for one of the two story lines he collaborates with Renée Ballard and the Open/Unsolved Unit of the LAPD.

I haven’t had a truly glowing review for one of Connelly’s new books for a while now, and this one isn’t going to be the exception. It’s not a BAD book, but…I found it disappointing. I am just not connecting with this Stilwell guy. Honestly, he doesn’t have much of a personality, and I don’t even remember (if we have ever been told) what he looks like! Tall, short, style sense, facial hair, I couldn’t tell you. And that’s the case for all the other characters too. They are names, they are in some cases uniforms (park ranger, plainclothes, whatever), but everything pretty much rests on dialogue, and I’m finding that kind of lackluster.

This was a two-story mystery, and one of them (the discovery of a serial killer operating both on the island and on the mainland) started out intriguing and then was unexpectedly truncated and dropped, while the other (the fatal shooting of one of Stil’s deputies) remained open at the end of the book, so there was little satisfaction.

I enjoyed it when Stil got together with Renée Ballard and the Open-Unsolved guys to coordinate the one takedown, but then that…went away, as if Connelly was simply tired of the story thread and didn’t want to continue it. The last scene in the book when you find out some things about the murder of the deputy was the most exciting, but it also stopped short.

There are lip-service mentions of Harry and Maddie Bosch but Harry doesn’t actually appear on the page, and Maddie is present at one briefing but doesn’t speak! Like I said, it’s not a bad book, but if I contrast it with some of Connelly’s early Bosch books or his Lincoln Lawyer series, these Catalina ones fall even flatter than the Ballards, for me. Three stars, but only just.