Connelly, the master of the police procedural, gives us another thought-provoking Harry Bosch novel, this one (#17 in the series) taking place near the end of Bosch’s long career as a homicide detective in Los Angeles. While not the best Connolly’s ever written, The Drop manages to engross the reader from the first pages to the last, while giving us some controversial social issues to chew on along the way. As is typical of Connelly, we have two simultaneous plots going on. One is an […]
A Serial Killer Haunts Post-WWII Italy
Bojhalian takes us on a visit to Italy’s beautiful Tuscany during one of the most horrifying periods in that country’s history, when the German occupation had splintered the nation between the resistance, the collaborators, and the majority caught in between who mostly struggled to survive without selling their souls to the devil. But beyond a thought-provoking examination of choices and consequences under wartime conditions, Bojhalian also throws us into the middle of a hunt for a serial killer 10 years after the war’s end, a […]
A Grisly Thriller with a Touch of Humor
The fifth in a series of thrillers about Portland Detective Archie Sheridan and his arch-nemesis and former lover Gretchen Lowell is both grisly and well-written: two crucial elements in a thriller worth the read. The essence of the plot is that horrendous murders are happening in apparently random ways, with only one linking piece of evidence that no one as yet understands. Detective Sheridan receives a summons to visit Gretchen, also known as the infamous “Beauty Killer,” a sadistic serial killer who is doing life […]
Mosley probes black-white relations in novel set in 1965 Watts
This classic noir mystery takes place during the summer of 1965, during the bloody rampages in Watts that devastated portions of Los Angeles and left a permanent boot mark on the nation’s collective backside. A white man in the wrong place and the wrong time is dragged out of his car and beaten severely before he manages to break away from the mob and is given shelter in the nearby apartment of a young black woman known as Little Scarlet. When her beaten, strangled and […]