Over the weekend I read Michael Connelly's Desert Star (2022), the 24th book in the Harry Bosch series and the fifth in the Renee Ballard series. I've read all the books in both series to this point, some of them more than once. (I'm not caught up with the Lincoln Lawyer series). I didn't like this one very much. I'm going to write to think through some possible reasons why, just speculations rather than opinions set in stone.
In the past several years, I've often claimed that Michael Connelly is one of the best, if not the best, contemporary writers of the American police procedural. For the unfamiliar, Connelly began his career as a crime journalist. His books are primarily set in Los Angeles, California and follows Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch and his family (half-brother Mickey Haller, daughter Maddy) and friends (Renee Ballard) from 1992 to the present, with the characters and books moving through time. In 201, Connelly introduced a new protagonist detective, Renee Ballard, though merged her books with Bosch's after just one solo outing. And a good merger it was--I think Dark Sacred Night was one of Connelly's better mysteries, if I remember right.
My opinion about Connelly's skill at the police procedural was forged in the last five years. I started reading Connelly as a teenager, but embarked on a reread (via audiobook) of everything published to date in 2019/2020. Earlier in the year, I started a reread of the Ballard subseries in order to catch up to the handful I hadn't read--this book, The Dark Hours (2021) and The Waiting (2024). I'll read the last before the end of the year.
I think this is still an opinion I'd defend, but this book and the last* have me doubting this and wondering: has Connelly lost the touch, or was I wrong? Connelly is almost 70 and has put out at least a book every year for the entirety of the 20th century. At that pace, they can't all be winners! Even Agatha Christie, also prodigious, has stinkers. Maybe the last couple are just a lull, but the latest book has got me thinking of the problem of the detective in such a long series.
It's a vexing issue, keeping a character going for decades and double-digit-long series. Is the detective unchanging and basically ageless, like Poirot or Marple? Does he experience character growth, like Lord Peter? Do her acquaintances move, die, grow distant, return, like Elly Griffiths' Ruth Galloway?** Connelly wants to have it both ways, which is sometimes great and sometimes a weakness. His characters fortunes change within their careers: Renee Ballard starts out exiled to "the late show," the night shift, due to crossing the wrong powerful man, and I've positively lost track of the number of times that Harry Bosch has been fired by the LAPD, only to return to working for some branch of the police in some capacity. Despite these career changes, both characters are essentially static in their personalities and beliefs. Both Bosch and Ballard are Connelly's platonic ideal of a True Detective: ravenous for justice, damaged people, monomaniacally fixated on solving crime, essentially loners, often willing to work within a system but always outsiders and often at odds with it. Both characters may grapple with big questions and doubts and may even appear to experience character growth and change, but there's a cyclical return to the status quo of characterization in these books.
And I don't think that's a problem, necessarily. This archetype, and its consequences, clearly fascinates Connelly. I like it too--police detectives who are perpetual outsiders, who grapple with the way systems are often at odds with justice, are my favorite character to lead a police procedural. The American justice system deserves critiquing, and one of the strengths of Connelly's work over the years is his attention to issues like police corruption and violence. While I do like long series that have a lot of character growth and change over time, I don't think a series needs it in order to be good. I love Christie, after all! A fairly static detective can be a really solid pole to build a story around, and can provide a canvas for a lot of nuanced meditations about crime and justice. This is a feature I like in Christie, and I think Connelly's better work does this.
The problem is that Connelly seems to want to give his characters growth and change, only to perpetually revoke it when the story and abstract ideas of justice call for it. Sometimes, unfortunately, even within the same book! In Desert Star, Bosch goes from lamenting that a suspect died before facing justice in the courts to embracing vigilante violence within a matter of chapters. It's nonsensical! But the anxieties of systemic versus vigilante justice are frequent agitations for Bosch, and I can almost write off such vacillations of character because they are such familiar occupations to him. Almost. I wish Connelly would just embrace a mostly static detective, because character change is not a strength of his, and it stands out as a mistake when everything around the characters change, and when the characters themselves even seem to reach turning points, only to be returned to the status quo.
My biggest complaint with Desert Star is that it does not have enough Ballard, and doesn't show her off well when she is on page. She hardly gets to detect, and almost every single case epiphany and breakthrough is given to Bosch. I hate this because I love Ballard! The introduction of Ballard felt like a fresh turn in Connelly repertoire: as a woman and person of color, she offers new ways to study and critique the system, and I think her first few books were pretty great in how they did this. (For the most part--there's at least one unnecessary sexual assault). Unfortunately for me, Connelly is forever drawn to Bosch, as obsessive about his truest detective as the character is about crime. No spoilers, but I am hopeful that Bosch's detecting days may come to an end soon.
In some of the previous Bosch and Ballard books, the two characters were better balanced in ways that showed off the best of both: interestingly, while they are natural partners to one another, there's a lot of friction between them because they are (whether intentionally or not) so similar on paper with their True Detective qualities. The characters clash and rankle when the other makes ridiculous lone wolf decisions, and while the characters may not be self aware of the irony when they call each other to task for not calling backup or taking a phone, there's a fun self-awareness to the writing itself. Some of my favorite parts of Desert Star was the tension and the ease between the two characters. The book has some great tests of trust, and I felt kinship with Ballard's frustration at Bosch's infuriating old independent man decisions, like refusing to dial back shenanigans on an injured knee. (Hi, it's me and my dad.) I do love them together, but it works best when they are on more equal footing, and they simply weren't in this one.
Unrelated to characterization, my other disliked element of Desert Star was the plotting. In these later Bosch and Ballard books, Connelly has often adopted an A and B mystery structure, with two cases often changing places with one another throughout the book. This book had the same structure, but they didn't work well, maybe because the book felt a lot shorter than some of the others: it was only 9 hours on audio! That is not a lot of time to have not one, but two huge cases: a serial killer and a whole family killing. The cases themselves are interesting, but the investigation of them--especially of the murdered family--feels perfunctory and shallow. This is unfortunate, because I usually love how Connelly writes and showcases the minutia of detection and especially with cold cases, how different police policies and procedures create different types of evidence that the modern cold case detective must extract meaning from. Give me multiple pages of database searches! Gimme a week of thumbing through notecards documenting interactions between police and nighttime denizens of Hollywood! Give me close studies of old murder books! I love that shit, and Connelly is often great at it--but it's just not a big part of this book.
I'm hardly going to stop reading Connelly--in fact, rather than give me pause, this book inspired me to download his 1996 book The Poet to my device. I know I've read that one, but I don't think I ever read Connelly's returns to the journalist Jack McEvoy character, and the three books should give me enough time to cool my heels from this book before continuing on with the most recent Bosch/Ballard pairing.
I read another contemporary book last weekend, Liz Moore's The God of the Woods. I'm not sure if I have an essay about it in me, but I'll probably try to think through my mixed feelings on literary mysteries like this one. For now, let me just say that I'm feeling quite burned on contemporary lit mystery and looking forward to returning to Dorothy Sayers to close out my Summer of Sayers reread after I finish with this Connelly diversion!
*I'm not going to get into The Dark Hours -- maybe another day!
**A favorite series of mine! I'll write about it someday.
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