Nine & Draggin'

The better crime and suspense writers often recognize that their characters can get in ruts and that they need to offer them some different challenges now and again or there's no reason to pay money for a new book when the old ones are just as good and already on the shelf at home.

Whether or not that was the motivation behind Michael Connelly giving his irascible detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch a suddenly larger role in the raising of his teen-age daughter, her presence is likely to affect how Harry does his business for the Los Angeles Police Department. In the 13 previous Bosch outings, Harry has been able to go his own way, consequences be hanged, because he has relatively few local ties and strings.

But over the course of the last several years, he has been deepening his relationship with his daughter Madeline, whom he first met when she was four. Maddie lives with her mother in Hong Kong, a fact which takes on serious weight when Harry starts to investigate the murder of a liquor store owner who might have been killed by Chinese gangsters or "triads." A cell-phone video of his kidnapped daughter sends Harry off to Hong Kong to bring his investigative skills and willingness to cross lines, break rules and crack skulls to get her back. Neither everything in Hong Kong nor everything in Los Angeles will be what it seems by the time Harry comes to the end of the case.

One of the appeals of Connelly's Bosch series -- as well as his series featuring Bosch's half-brother Mickey Haller, a hard-nosed defense lawyer -- has been that even though the cases involved may mix straightforward and out of the ordinary circumstances, Connelly rarely settles for an obvious solution or plot turn. Big-city homicide investigations may have a lot of similarities and stories that center on their solutions can definitely take on a paint-by-number quality. Witness the last six or seven years of Law & Order, for example. Connelly has always seemed to be able to mix the plain-brown-wrapper-styled procedural of Ed McBain with enough different flavors to keep his books from being too much like every other detective story that's been written.

In 9 Dragons, though, Connelly puts Harry in a scenario that's played out probably thousands of times since Auguste Dupin figured out who killed Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter Camille: An important woman in the life of the lead investigator is believed to be imperiled by his work on a case, and he has to drop everything to try and find her. Even though Connelly's writing, pacing and characterization remain top-notch (he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985), the story is hackneyed enough to drop 9 Dragons towards the bottom of Harry's adventures.