Friday, January 30, 2015

THE BURNING ROOM: MICHAEL CONNELLY


Reading Michael Connelly again, following Harry Bosch, takes me back to the early 1980's when I first began reading the Harry Bosch novels. Then, Harry was just starting out as a detective.  Now, he's about ready to retire, teaching his young female partner, Lucia Soto, how to be a good detective.

Like other detective stories and TV shows, Harry now researches LAPD's Open Unsolved Cases.  In this one, a guitar player, shot ten years ago, finally dies, allowing the lab to trace the bullet to a rifle, thus begins the search for the shooter.  As they get closer to solving the case, Bosch realizes that Soto also seems to be working another case on her own.  He confronts her and she tells about a fire in a day care center, one in which several children die and she was one of the survivors.

So we have two cases going on and ironically, the solving of one leads to the other, both unsatisfactorily. As to the fire, the two crooks who started it as a diversion for a bank robbery are dead and their accomplish, a women, has disappeared until Soto and Bosch trace her to a nunnery. They realize that she had not intended for the fire to kill eight children and as penance, joined a nunnery, spending her time working with the poor.  She dies in Mexico, a result of a drug cartels war, thus ending the search.

And as for the guitar player, the bullet was not meant for him, but the trumpet player. They are able to trace the bullet back to the trumpet player and unfaithful wife, an irate husband, who just happens to be the money behind a well known and powerful politician, in fact, the ex Mayor of LA.  It ends with the death of one of the minions, no doubt acting on the orders of the higher ups, but nothing can be proved to indite them so he pays for it.  The plot is silly but I liked the relationship between Bosch and his young detective Lucia Soto, who earns her badge in Bosch's eyes.  I would not be surprised to see her in his next novel, as Bosch fades into the background, to retirement.

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