Harry Bosch is 70
Speaking of a Golden Bachelor…it had to come sometime. Has there ever been another police officer who has joined and left the LAPD and joined up again so many times? and had a career that spanned three or four departments and several separate locations and even a different police department or two? Not to mention a brief foray as a private eye. Yep, Harry’s getting up there, and I don’t want to say that Connelly is phasing him out just yet, but the fact that he has, in each of the past five books, shared star billing with Renée Ballard says “transition” to me. Seventy isn’t so old these days, but after being exposed to cesium during a previous case, Harry’s mortality is apparently something to contemplate more immediately.
I’m not real happy about that; although I liked Renee well enough in her debut novel, when she appeared to be an outsider to rival Bosch—sleeping in a tent on the beach with her dog, and dividing her time between the police force and surfing—I have mainly read the Renée Ballard books because she always appears in conjunction with Harry, and when he’s no longer with us, I’m not sure she has the moxie to carry a series alone. While I would definitely call the Bosch books police procedurals, the focus has always been squarely on Harry, and his personality defines and permeates every story; but Renée doesn’t have the same spark, and I fear that once Bosch is no longer even an outlier, I won’t find enough pizzazz left to keep reading.
I read the latest Harry/Renée book, and then realized that I had missed the one just before that, so I went back and read that one. In The Dark Hours, Renée is still working “the late show” (the overnight shift) without a partner, but when she gets in too deep or needs some backup, she doesn’t call on a fellow officer, most of whom seem to be phoning it in since the twin discouragements of the “defund the police” movement and the Covid epidemic, but rather on the retired Harry Bosch, at home and at loose ends. This could ultimately get her in a lot of trouble with the department, but she’s a risk-taker and knows what she needs to get a solve on her cases; what she needs is Bosch. In this book the two have an almost instinctual camaraderie that is fun to watch.
There’s a big contrast between that book and the next one, Desert Star. In this latest Bosch/Ballard pair-up, Ballard has become almost unrecognizable as the junior-grade maverick following in her mentor’s footsteps. Towards the end of The Dark Hours, a disgraced Ballard had quit the force and was considering teaming with Bosch in a private detective firm, but at the beginning of this one she is back in the LAPD, and has been made head of her own department, examining cold/unsolved cases for the Robbery/Homicide division, and reopening ones that are viable for moving ahead, due to DNA evidence or other new information. This promotion seems to have turned her into a cautious, uptight, stuffy version of herself, and it takes practically the whole book for her to unwind back into the Ballard we’ve met before.
The inclusion of Harry is made legitimate this time, since Ballard is empowered to recruit him as a volunteer and he is more than willing to fill his time focusing on a multiple murder he was never able to solve. He’s supposed to be working on a case that is important to the city councilman sponsoring the new unit, but as usual Harry prioritizes what he believes to be more essential, and in so doing gets both himself and Ballard in hot water more than once. Most of it is believable, but when he takes off for Florida without telling either Ballard or his daughter that he’s going, it was one step too far into uncharacteristic behavior for me. I ultimately enjoyed most of this book, but it certainly didn’t make me warm up to Ballard or cease to dread the retirement of one of the best detectives any mystery novelist ever created.
Catching up
I have read so very many series that I can’t keep track any more when a new book from one of them comes out, particularly if it’s a writer who is irregular in their production. With Louise Penny, you can always plan on a new Gamache hitting the bookstores somewhere between August and November each and every year, but others (such as Deborah Crombie) produce one so seldom that it’s depressing to go check up on what’s (not) happening.
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles is a fairly prolific writer, especially when one considers she has at least three different series going, and in different genres to boot. I discovered her first as a writer of police procedurals in the Bill Slider mystery series, but she’s more well known for her Morland Dynasty saga, and is now writing a new historical fiction series as well. I found out via my Kindle membership that there was a new Bill Slider, so this week I embarked on a read of #24, Before I Sleep.
The past few Sliders of late have been somewhat uneven, so I was pleased to discover that this was a particularly good one. Slider is tasked by the bumbling but good-natured Detective Superintendent Porson with a missing persons case, even though it’s not in his district and that’s not what he does (he generally solves murders), because word has come down from “on high” that this is a case that needs solving pronto. A woman has disappeared, and her husband is old school chums with the big boss, so Slider, who has an impressive solve rate and is also sometimes tiresome enough for the politicos to want to be rid of him, gets stuck with it. If he solves it, the glory redounds, and if he doesn’t, maybe he loses his job, so there’s a lot on the line.
Felicity Holland is a settled middle-aged woman married to a successful author, with an active social schedule and lots of hobbies and charities. One Tuesday after breakfast, when the husband has gone upstairs to begin his day of writing, she heads out for her weekly pottery class, but according to her husband she didn’t come home that night and hasn’t been heard from since. Being a vague, self-centered guy, he doesn’t remember the name of where she takes the class, has no idea who her after-class lunching friends are, and is basically unable to provide any useful information to the police, but expects immediate results nonetheless. His rather hysterical theory that she has been snatched up by a serial killer is causing him to make himself a nuisance, while Slider and his team have to buckle down to do the plodding police work that will ultimately trace her movements—check the CCTV cameras, the bus passes, the taxi services, talk to her relatives, find her friends, maybe delve a little into her past.
I liked how this evolved from a nuisance case into a legitimate “misspers” and from there to a probable murder mystery. The usual team is on duty, with a few new people added; Porson continues with his malapropisms, now enabled by Slider, who somewhat ironically inserts his own into the conversation to enjoy watching Porson struggle with the thought that what he said just isn’t right. Atherton is quick with the puns, and also has a new, possibly more permanent love interest at last. There’s not a whole lot about Joanna and the family in this one, but enough to keep things going. I figured out a key plot point quite a while before it was revealed, but it didn’t spoil my enjoyment of its revelation at the end. All in all, a satisfying read. Keep them coming, Ms. Harrod-Eagles!
The Book Adept 