The Drop, A Harry Bosch Novel by Michael Connelly

 The Book

Harry starts off the book getting the good news that he will be allowed to stay on at the LAPD for another 3 years. He return to the force contract is up, and he have been forced out at any time. Not any more. He has returned to OU, Open Unsolved Unit, and his partner is none other than the former Asian Crimes Detective David Chu. Bosch and Chu are a floating team who get assigned cases on an overflow basis. When a DNA hit comes back, identifiying a suspect who could not possibly have done the job, they are called in to take over from the younger detectives. Although the younger detectives are a bit miffed, the conflict is minor, because they are about to testify in their first solved case, and need the time to prepare for trial. All's well that starts well, I guess? 

No sooner does Bosch start sinking his teeth into the case, when he and Chu are called out to investigate a fresh homicide. Or is it? And Bosch is leery of getting involved in, as Connelly puts it, high jingo, the term in the book for when a case is both high profile and highly political. But the question of is it suicide or is it murder cannot be ignored, even in the case of the son of Bosch's enemy, Irvin Irving,  One part police procedural, one part puzzle mystery, we see Bosch work both cases with passion. And at the end of the day, Bosch's biggest worry is that he may have lost his edge. 

My Thoughts

Once again we see Michael Connelly stretching his muscles. This book adds a complexity to the plotting, not that I have ever found his work lacking. For once, he is defying convention and the A plot and B plot do not meet to accelerate to a final, climatic scene. I feel like the book and the reader are better served for it. However, it is such a departure that I wonder why he shifted focus. Did he have just parts of each story, and unable to stretch them the full way, he combined them to try something new? Or was killing off yet another of Bosch's partners and his ex-wife in the previous book that he felt he had finally gone as far as he could go, and now needed to calm things down? I did feel like 9 Dragons "jumped the shark" so to speak. And by this point, any cop IRL would have been, and should have been fired. At yet, is that not the point of fiction, for us to suspend disbelief? But up to a certain point. So I liked that this book was a departure from the old way of doing things. I like seeing this growth in a writer. 

How Much My Library Card Saved Me

As many books as it's been between my last Bosch and this Bosch, you may have believed I had given up on reading Michael Connelly this summer. However, Connelly is popular, and due to library user error, I requested a rare copy of this book instead of the readily available one, causing me to wait nearly a week for the book to come in. When it was still on the wait list after five days, I realized my error and found a first edition readily available and picked it up the next day. Oops. I have already requested the next book, so let's hope I've done a better job this time. 

This book is a first edition, so cool. Although, at this point in Connelly's career, and coming off the very successful Matthew McConaughey The Lincoln Lawyer film, I am certain this is not a rare book. It is however, an extremely well made hard cover. It has not been as gently read as other books in my library, which is a testament to the popularity of this book at the time. At least one, and likely more than one person, has dogeared this book. I deduce more than one, because there is a difference in the depth of creases. I wonder if this is the type of clue anthropologists will sift through in the future, perhaps while excavating a dump or something, and what they will be able to deduce from it. 

It entered into my library on Dec 05, 2011 and is priced at $27.99. 

This book                   $27.99

This Summer            $161.08