TITLE: The Drop (Harry Bosch #17)
AUTHOR: Michael Connelly
GENRE: Fiction/Mystery/Suspense
PUBLISHED: November 28, 2011
RATING: ★★★★☆
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes
MOBILISM LINK: 28 Novel Collection by Michael Connelly
Review: Harry Bosch has been given three years before he must retire from the LAPD, and he wants cases more fiercely than ever. In one morning, he gets two.
DNA from a 1989 rape and murder matches a 29-year-old convicted rapist. Was he an eight-year-old killer or has something gone terribly wrong in the new Regional Crime Lab? The latter possibility could compromise all of the lab's DNA cases currently in court.
Then Bosch and his partner are called to a death scene fraught with internal politics. Councilman Irvin Irving's son jumped or was pushed from a window at the Chateau Marmont. Irving, Bosch's longtime nemesis, has demanded that Harry handle the investigation.
Relentlessly pursuing both cases, Bosch makes two chilling discoveries: a killer operating unknown in the city for as many as three decades, and a political conspiracy that goes back into the dark history of the police department.
It took me a while to finish this book and it shames me that it did cause its an amazing roller coaster ride of politics, corruption, love, lose and death. Artfully woven to make a story that is eloquently readable and worth not being able to put down unless sleep takes hold or you have to eat dinner and you don't want to spill food on the paper or screen from which you are reading the story.
I've read Michael's books before. In fact I think the first one I read was his HUGELY popular The Lincoln Lawyer. It has been a few years since I had read another book by him and it is a good thing I picked a good book to reacquaint myself with Harry Bosch.
The Drop has multi-faceted meanings. Primarily to deal with Harry and The DROP or Deferred Retirement Option Plan which the LAPD brought back Harry but has given him a time limit to his future but Harry isn't going to let that stop him as he gets 2 cases in one day: an unsolved cold case rape and murder plus the politically influenced assignment of the death of a man whose father that has a history with Bosch.
Swinging between the two cases dutifully Connelly works literary magic to keep you interested in them both and the introduction of a woman after Harry's heart. Each character is strongly written. There is no weakness in the sense that you get bored when one makes an appearance. Even in the case of the recently deceased you feel that the character has presence and a responsibility to be there for reasons other than being dead.
You learn a lot understanding the police feelings about politics interfering with investigations and demeanor toward pedophilia. Harry holds no sympathy for the criminals responsible even when he has to confront one who is integral to the cold case and was a victim of pedophilia himself. Though there might be some sympathy, Harry holds it back because of the personal belief of them being deemed dirty by not just society but him as well.
There are a lot of refreshing moments which Connelly brings in just as the action gets intense. Harry and his daughter Maddy's relationship is the strongest and rare cases of which a child understands what it means to have an absent father when the job is being a policeman. But Harry doesn't want it to be like that, he wants to be active with his daughter and maintain constant levels of interaction. I got the sense that as much as daughter looked up to father, that it was reciprocated and that father looked up to the daughter as his release from grizzled police detective to doting father and that he truly wanted to be a nurturing, helpful guide.
Harry Bosch wrote:Everybody counts or nobody counts