Some Back Catalog

A wealthy restaurant owner is on trial for the murder of his wife. A crucial piece of evidence was found by a Los Angeles Police Department detective with a suspected but unproven shady past. The rich man's lawyer would like some dirt on the detective to help create reasonable doubt and spring his client, so he hires Elvis Cole to dig into that past and see what comes. Ordinarily Elvis wouldn't get himself into the middle of something like this but he's got enough doubts of his own that he'd like to learn some of the answers.

Sunset Express, the sixth Elvis Cole novel, was published in 1996 and so just about every incident that you think might be a kind of commentary on the way celebrity and money can influence the legal system (O.J. who?) is intended to be one. Crais is clear that while the system is meant to function a certain way, the reality of fallible and self-interested human beings, combined with enough resources, can put a thumb on Lady Justice's scales. As Elvis, who fancies himself not naïve in these matters, digs into the past and present issues, he becomes both suspicious and disgusted. His developing romance with Lucy Chenier may not be the only thing the case endangers, as signs of a conspiracy make him a liability that someone wants dealt with...preferably permanently. Elvis and his friend, the taciturn tough-guy Joe Pike, may have more than celebrity culture to deal with before everything is over.

Cole does the "wisecracking P.I." bit better than most, for the simple reason that Crais is funnier than a lot of other authors who try it and he writes a better book. Express finds him in a good groove in both of those areas, although the interactions with Lucy, her son Ben and Lucy's ex-husband seem like they would have been better in a different book. Conversations with Lucy give Elvis a chance to comment on the wackiness of LA's "scene," but otherwise they feel like pitstops in the main storyline. Even so, Express is one of the better books of one of the better smart-aleck sleuth series on the shelves.

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Often thrillers and spy novels that put their leads into contact with the highest circles of power will create fictitious versions of the real people in those offices. The agent might have an important role in saving, say, the President of the United States, but it won't be any actual president. The author might, if he or she has a low view of said president, create the fictional one to mirror the worst aspects of the real one, at least as they see them, but the character will still be fictional. Ted Bell mixes and matches his real world analogues with fictional characters as they encounter his top British agent, Alex Hawke. Among the actual people that he's cast is Russian President Vladimir Putin, who owes Hawke a debt for the latter's help in stopping an attempt to recreate Imperial Russia in Tsar -- a debt because the plotters intended to succeed over Putin's dead body.

The wily and vicious Russian president opens the tenth Hawk novel, Overkill, by surviving another assassination attempt -- but he has to flee the country in order to do so and is cut off from his power base by the oligarchs who tried to remove him. But Putin still has allies, and he has a plan as well. In the meantime, we find Alexander Hawke on a hunt for his kidnapped son -- a significant problem not just because he doesn't know who took the boy or why, but because the list of potential suspects and old enemies is almost too long to count. The two men will once again converge in unexpected ways as Hawke needs to not only find his son, he needs to try to block Putin's bloody plan for revenge and a return to power.

Overkill has just enough focus to its outlandish plot to keep things moving from start to finish, although whether that's a desirable outcome is left up to the reader. Bell's whimsical take on some aspects of the spy thriller, when married to a sensible plot, make for a fun romp around the world. His choice to include real world characters adds an interesting flavor (in one novel, Prince William and Prince Harry employ their actual military training to help protect their family from terrorists). But in this case, the mix is uninteresting, the overall plot uninspiring and the results is a book well below average for Lord Alexander Hawke.

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Michael Connelly has been writing his Harry Bosch character for a long time and has aged him pretty close to real time over the course of his 20 or so books. That means that Harry's getting up in years and while he may be just as dogged a detective as he ever was, his physical limitations start to show. It also means that the series itself could start to show wear -- there's only so many times Harry could confront superior officers who care more about politics than about finding whatever justice is available for those unable to speak for themselves -- the victims that murderers have left behind.

In 2017, Connelly brought a new character into the loosely connected "universe" centered on Harry and his half-brother, lawyer Mickey Haller: LAPD Detective Renée Ballard. A confrontation of her own with a sleazy superior left Ballard on the "Late Show," one of the detectives who responds during the night shift when a body is found but who usually hands the case off to another detective if it proves more involved. In 2018's Dark Sacred Night, Ballard meets Bosch, as the latter is snooping through LAPD files -- after hours, because he's been put out to pasture. He's hunting information on an old murder of the teenaged daughter of a woman he met during his most recent case. Ballard doesn't turn Bosch in, but she also lets him know he shouldn't be sneaking around. His drive to solve the case, though, appeals to her and the pair find their deep desire to bring killers to justice gives them common goals -- and perhaps common enemies in the LAPD authority structure that looked the other way when Ballard was harassed and Bosch was sent packing.

Although Connelly's stumbled now and again by sliding into some of the crime genre's tropes, he still produces quality work and uses its familiar palette to paint realistic characters in realistic and engaging situations. Neither Bosch nor Ballard are ideal folks, but their shared quest for justice draws readers in and makes them people to root for. "Everybody counts or nobody counts," Bosch says, and his dedication to that potentially corny idea sells the reader on it as his clear passion. Ballard seems similar although she has her own twist on the idea; it's not just cloned from the older detective.

The story of the murdered teenager and her mother in recovery was used in the most recent season of Amazon's Bosch series, but the TV version actually has some more resonance and makes some better choices than Connelly does in the novel. Still, Dark Sacred Night does the necessary work to bring the pair together and set the stage for how Harry Bosch can be a viable character as he ages past the ability to take on the physical demands of his job. But it does so while keeping Renée Ballard and interesting and complex character in her own right; future collaborations will allow Connelly the luxury of writing about two interesting people in the same novel.