The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly

At the end of my review for The Lincoln Lawyer, Connelly’s previous book about Mickey Haller, self-proclaimed “sleazy defense lawyer”, I suggested that the Bosch-meets-Haller sequel wasn’t far away and here it is.

Detective Bosch and Haller are half brothers, something Bosch knows but Haller doesn’t. Haller has been off the scene for a couple of years after being gun shot and then becoming addicted to pain killers. At the beginning of The Brass Verdict, he’s about to make a tentative return to work when 31 active cases drop into his lap.

Another lawyer has died in suspicious circumstances and left Haller his practice. Unfortunately, the dead lawyer’s briefcase and laptop were stolen, so Haller has to scramble to get up to speed. One of the 31 cases is a high-profile Hollywood murder case. So far so good, but then Bosch turns up and starts asking questions about the dead lawyer and why he was fielding phone calls from the FBI, and what happened to $100,000 that disappeared from his bank account, and Haller finds himself caught up in the sleazy tactics of his predecessor before he’s quite ready to get back to full-time work.

This book, like The Lincoln Lawyer before it, is a fascinating read. The level of detail you get as Haller builds his case is extraordinary; you wouldn’t think the minutiae of practising law would be interesting, but they are. Haller is always searching for the “magic bullet”, the key piece of evidence which will blow the case wide open and plant reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. Connelly is so very practised at writing this kind of thing that it’s all too easy to find yourself unable to put the thing down at one in the morning. A genuine page-turner that builds to a gripping climax.

Highly recommended.

Point of No Return – Scott Frost

I was disappointed by this, the third Alex Delillo novel. I’d previously enjoyed Frost’s Never Fear, but found this to be both preposterous and skippable: no point of return.

Whereas Alex Delillo of the Pasadena PD seemed quite a different sort of protagonist in the earlier book, with positive personal relationships and respect for her colleagues, here she runs all the classically stupid risks you’d expect of an out-of-control maverick cop, and it’s all so ridiculously portentous that you just want to tell her to get a grip.

Like Spook Country (see review below), this book has Iraq (and GPS chips) as part of its backdrop, but not for one moment does it seem reasonable for a detective in the Pasadena PD to get involved in the affairs of a bunch of mercenaries and military types (who operate a long way out of her jurisdiction) in her search for a missing LAPD cop she met once at a conference. What?

Conspiracy is it? Cover up? Another one?

The inner voice of Delillo, as she agonises and labours every point and lurches from place to place, grates on the nerves. What has this got to do with her job? Nothing. But she takes “a few days off” anyway to look into matters, never seeming to notice that she’s making everything a lot worse than it was to start with. There are no scenes here with more than two people: Delillo goes through a series of one-on-ones with people who either (a) drop dead, or (b) disappear, and whinges so much about every little thing that goes wrong that you wish she’d (a) drop dead, or (b) disappear.

No point, no return, not recommended.

Never Fear by Scott Frost

I can’t remember why or when I picked this book up, but there it was on my shelf, and not yet read.

This is a US crime thriller in the vein of Michael Connelly’s Bosch series, also set in Los Angeles, but with a female protagonist/narrator in the form of Alex Delillo, a Lieutenant in the Pasadena PD. Unlike Bosch, Delillo has a positive relationship with her superior in Pasadena, and is very close to her current partner.

Just as the Bosch series have been sometimes critical of the Los Angeles PD (an easy target since the King case, after all), this novel pits Delillo against the LAPD machine as she investigates the death of a half-brother she didn’t know she had.

This 400-pager is tightly plotted, irresistible reading, with a labyrinthine story that should keep you guessing. There’s a high body count, and a quite bleak view of the justice system in Southern California.

I hadn’t read any Frost before, and there’s clearly at least one Delillo story before this one (Run the Risk). Before turning to thrillers, Frost has written scripts for Twin Peaks, Babylon 5, and Andromeda, among others. This is not surprising, as his more famous brother is Mark Frost. It says on the book’s blurb that he wrote for The X Files, too, but this credit isn’t on his IMDB entry.

This is good stuff, and I’d certainly pick up another one. A little bit despairing, perhaps, and with a title that doesn’t really mean anything or have much to do with the story, but you don’t read thrillers for the laughs.

Gone to Ground by John Harvey

John Harvey has been one of the leading British exponents of the police procedural since the 1989 publication of Lonely Hearts, the first in the Nottingham-based Resnick series that ended with Last Rites 10 years later. (Except Resnick is back, in Harvey’s just-published Cold in Hand.)

This 2007 novel, Gone to Ground (The paperback came out in January 2008), is a police procedural in a similar vein, with Cambridge police officers Will Grayson and Helen Walker investigating what appears to be a hate crime – the brutal murder of a gay academic. There are also links to Nottingham, though, so you’re constantly reminded of the Resnick series and some of its supporting characters.

The art of the police procedural is to show the puzzle of the crime being solved by slow, painstaking increments: leg work, paper work, and blind chance. Harvey brings to life the harsh realities of ASBO Britain, the violent, struggling underclass and their casual hatreds; and the venal, corrupt business men and their lawyers.

Neither Grayson nor Walker strike you as being brilliant: though Walker seems to have better instincts. The inquiry into one murder is complicated by another, and the officers (and the original victim’s sister) follow investigative paths that don’t necessarily pay off, but lead – eventually – to some form of resolution. Don’t come here expecting to find a maverick loner who solves crimes singlehandedly and beats up the bad guys in his spare time. Instead you get something of the flavour of what it must really be like: knocking on doors, trawling through paperwork, interviewing witnesses who may be lying – but not necessarily because they’re guilty of this particular crime.

Accurate and realistic it may be, but I didn’t find this particularly gripping. It’s been a while since I read a police procedural, and I found the progress to be a bit slow. I shouldn’t complain; the last crime novel I read, I seem to remember complaining it was all a bit skimpy. Still, if police procedural is your thing: with believable characters and a sense of how difficult it really is to get the evidence you need for a successful prosecution, then they probably don’t come better than this.

The Overlook by Michael Connelly

I’ve had a grumpy bumper summer of reading, and this one didn’t help my outlook. I knew what to expect, because I’d heard Connelly talking to that nice Simon Mayo about it on Five Live, but the in-studio reviewers were raving about it, so I bought it anyway.

My copy was one of a pile “signed by the author” in my local Waterstones, but I wouldn’t have been bothered about that if the hardback hadn’t been half price, too. Anyway, Connelly’s signature looks like he was holding the pen in his mouth and signing four other books with his hands and feet at the same time.

So, what have we got? At 272 pages this is skimpy, an afternoon’s read. Originally serialised in the New York Times, Connelly rejigged it some for the book edition, but what you’ve got is a 24-style time-of-the-essence thriller featuring Harry Bosch.

It starts off with an execution-style killing, Bosch is called to the scene, the FBI get involved, blah blah. I’m reluctant to give more of the plot away. Quite a lot was given away on Five Live, and just one phrase was enough for me to know exactly how this one was going to turn out.

Unfortunately, we’ve seen the conflict-of-agency thing too many times, and frankly I’d expect more of Bosch these days – given the knocks he’s taken in recent outings – than that he’d get involved in yet another one.

There’s nothing wrong with Connelly’s writing in this one, it’s just that it’s all too thin. I think this was best left as an outing in a newspaper, perhaps publishable along with another (or several other) short piece(s). Strictly for completists, and whatever you do, don’t pay full price for it, because it is not a full-price book.

Break No Bones by Kathy Reichs

Kathy Reichs is the creator of the character Temperance Brennan, forensic pathologist, as featured in the TV Series Bones. Now, Bones on TV is quite good, because it’s got that bloke from Buffy/Angel in it and other supporting cast members who make up the shortfall in the lead character, who is uptight, smug, ungiving and generally annoying. In fact, the chemistry between Emily Deschanel and David Boreanz is excellent, and Boreanz in particular is showing that his turn as Angel was no fluke.

But the books upon which Bones is based are a different matter. This was my first, and (I suspect) my last. The problem with a writer who makes such a huge deal out of the fact that she has the same expertise as her lead character and works in the real world in the same professional capacity is that she comes across as a bit, well, smug. Arrogant. Self-regarding, self-promoting, conceited, and generally up herself.

In other words, Kathy Reichs looms large as you read the book, and you wish she wouldn’t. In fact, you miss all the TV characters, none of whom are in the book. You miss Seeley Booth. In print, I didn’t care about any of the characters, and I wanted it all to be over in a nice, neat, TV-sized 42 minutes. It wasn’t.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch – Retrieval artist novels

Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s The Disappeared is the first in a series of novels set in the milieu of her novella “The Retrieval Artist.” Now, I haven’t knowingly read the original novella, though it’s on my list of things to do, but I was attracted to Rusch’s writings when I read “Diving into the Wreck” in Asimov’s magazine (see below).

The Disappeared combines two genres, really, because it’s a police procedural with a science fiction backdrop. It’s an absolutely cracking premise: imagine cultural relativism and multi-culturalism to an nth degree, whereby humans are obliged to abide by the decisions of multi-cultural courts to pay for the consequences of crimes committed against aliens on alien planets, and the police have to enforce those laws and decisions.

For example, commit a crime against one species, and the courts may rule that your firstborn belongs to that species. Your choice: don’t have children, or try to disappear, witness-protection style, and start a new life with no connection to your old. In another instance, your sentence might be several years on an alien penal colony.

Disappearance agencies spring up, arranging for people to shed their old identities and live under a new name, somewhere else. But what happens if that agency turns out to have a corrupt employee, willing to sell your new identity to those with the original warrant? And is it really corrupt, when what the agencies are doing is illegal? It’s all good stuff, and Rusch keeps the picture complex. Your sympathies lie both with the helpless fugitives, who in some cases were merely high-spirited youngsters, or didn’t understand the laws they broke or the offence they caused; and with the cops who are obliged to enforce the laws they have no liking for – themselves in fear of accidentally crossing the line. Even the aliens are not portrayed as wholly evil – ruthless, perhaps – as they try to see justice done.
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The second in the Retrieval Artist series of novels, Extremes is a classic police procedural science fiction hybrid, with action that takes place, 24-style, over just one day.

As a failed writer (among many other failures), I find it interesting to see Rusch’s narrative technique. She moves rapidly between three main points of view (Flint, the Retrieval Artist, De Ricci, the cop, and Oliviari, a Tracker posing as a medic), picking up each strand of narrative, not after the elision of some time, but where she left off. There isn’t time, in other words, for one character to learn the full details of what another knows, and so all three of them reach their own conclusions based on their own portion of the evidence.

The crime in question is a murder during a – preposterous – extreme sport event on the Moon. Unbelievable, you’d think, if you didn’t already know the hilariously stupid risks people already take on Earth in order to entertain themselves. Of course people will try equally stupid things on the Moon.

So, police procedural, but what does SF add to the mix? The setting, obviously, plays a key role. One of the great details of Rusch’s Retrieval Artist future is that people inhabit domed communities on the Moon, which turns out to be not very glamorous. The air recycling is inefficient, so it can get stuffy; the community has expanded haphazardly over a length of time, so there are old/new bits, crappy building materials, low quality synthesised foods, and so on. Crucially, in a domed community living on recycled air, the release of a deadly virus has a particular impact.

This creative use of the setting extends into the 3rd in the series, Consequences, in which an assassin doctors a crime scene by reprogramming the cleaning robots. First of all they suck up the blood and brains; then the killer re-arranges the bodies, and the robots spew it all out again in a pattern to match the new arrangement. Genius. How would Gil Grissom cope with that?
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For the 4th of the Retrieval Artist space Opera Mysteries Kristine Kathryn Rusch returns to the initial premise of the series, which is the convoluted and difficult legal system that surrounds human-alien relations.

The Disty are an alien race who are horrified by death, to the point where any contact with a dead body is considered a contamination that needs to be cleansed by ritual. They have hundreds of rituals, depending on circumstance. Any ground where a body is discovered is unclean, and those involved in the discovery need to be cleansed by ritual, too.

Depending on how close the unclean person is to the dead person, the ritual can be more or less invasive and destructive. If no family member can be found, the ritual is essentially the same as a death penalty.

Worst of all, the Disty have occupied Mars (a brilliant stroke by Rusch – all other Mars colonies I’ve ever read about were created by humans, and the idea that a planet in our own solar system can be under a completely alien system of government gives you the same chills you’d get if people in our society really could be [legally] executed for drawing cartoons.), which means that they live in close proximity to humans, who must tie themselves in knots in order to avoid contravening Disty law.

When humans fall foul of the Disty, the only realistic option is to disappear – witness protection (or Rushdie) style – to avoid the inevitable violent end.

Buried Deep opens with the discovery of a dead body, which – to the aliens’ horror – appears to have been buried underneath a Disty housing settlement for at least 30 years. The human female’s lost family need to be found for the cleansing ritual, or else the other humans involved (police, pathologist, anthropologist) will face a fate worse than (and including) death.

Unfortunately, the woman was not what she seemed, and finding her family looks to be an impossible task. Things go from bad to worse when a further 100 mummified human bodies are found in the same area.

This parable of extreme cultural relativism is at heart a mystery that needs to be solved, both to reveal an unwritten history (how did 100 bodies end up there?) and – perhaps – save the unwitting humans who stumbled upon a serious problem in the course of doing their jobs. Like all the best SF, it throws the world in which we live into a sharp perspective, exaggerating our own difficulties in rubbing along with religionist nutters of various persuasions to page-turning effect.