Good news, good news, Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch is back, and the even better news is that he is as grouchy, irritable and in-your-face as ever. As regular readers of the series will know, our hero is the fiercely independent, thorn-in-the-side of his superiors, Los Angeles police detective who has already rumbled his way through five previous volumes. For those coming new to the novels, this one will do as an excellent introduction, although I still consider the third one, Concrete Blonde, to be the nonpareil of the set.
In Angels Flight, Harry is married to former FBI agent Eleanor Wish, but the marriage is in the process of breaking up. Not surprising, really, considering Eleanor's fetish for gambling and Harry's almost paranoid devotion to his work. This sub-plot is kept very much in the background, however, as Harry sets out on the trail of the murderer of one Howard Elias, a high-profile black lawyer whose speciality was in prosecuting LAPD cops for police brutality, racism and corruption.
Found shot to death in a carriage of the funicular known as Angels Flight, Elias is not exactly mourned by the guardians of the law responsible for finding his killer. As a matter of fact, most cops hated his guts and, as a former partner tells Harry, he would be quite happy to dance, not to mention urinate, on the man's grave.
So Harry is at an immediate disadvantage in his investigation, and with the other two members of his team, Edgar and Rider, has to plough a lonely furrow. The case that Elias had to hand at the time of his death was one where a low-life called Michael Harris was suing the city of Los Angeles for unlawful arrest. He had been accused of the abduction, rape and killing of a 12-year-old white girl, the daughter of millionaire car dealer Sam Kincaid.
The main evidence against him was the fact that his fingerprints had been found on the girl's schoolbook, but the defence alleged that the prints had been planted by the investigating officers. Acquitted of the charge by a sympathetic jury, Harris hired Elias, the result being a $10 million dollar defamation suit.
Believing that this case is at the nub of the problem, Harry reopens it and immediately all kinds of poisonous snakes-in-the-grass begin to slither forth. Hindered by his superiors, blocked by his peers in the department and having to put up with an old enemy from IAD, he refuses to be deterred. As he moves like an avenging angel through the city of Los Angeles - itself ready to explode after the Rodney King episode, the 1992 riots and the O.J. Simpson trial - Harry becomes the one lonely, honest man traversing the mean streets.
He is a complex character, dark, brooding, quite often insecure; his philosophy is that " . . . you didn't win justice by carrying a sign or a cardboard coffin. You earned it by being on the side of the righteous, by being unswayed from that path", while "the idea of a man leaving his mark with the one shot he's given appealed to him. He believed in the one shot. He didn't know if he'd had his yet - it wasn't the kind of thing you knew and understood until you looked back over your life as an old man. But he had the feeling that it was still out there waiting for him. He had yet to take his one shot."
So Harry ploughs on in search of his "one shot" when, like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, it all becomes worthwhile. Let's hope he will continue searching, with Michael Connelly faithfully recording his odyssey through many more volumes. It's strangely comforting, somehow, to think that there may possibly be cantankerous SOBs like Harry out there guarding our flanks.
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