three thrillers three

three thrillers
Originally uploaded by mcmrbt.

Michael Connelly has Bosch back on the force in this latest instalment (The Closers); quite right too. Retirement didn't suit Bosch, nor the life of a private eye. Bosch goes back to an LAPD that is in the process of cleaning itself up, and like the South African process of reconciliation, looking back at old cases with new eyes. Cold cases has become a bit of a televisual cliché of late - although not handled that well in my opinion - and Connelly ruefully acknowledges this, having one of the minor characters work in publicity for such a programme (and ignored by Bosch).

Anyway, it's a decent enough outing for Bosch, though you wonder how many cold cases he can investigate before it gets stale.

Mother and daughter (ew) team P J Tracy is (are?) still on a roll, with Dead Run, their third novel in as many years. This one, 24 style, takes place in the course of one day, featuring many familiar characters confronted with a terrorist poison gas plot gone awry. Good, page-turning genre stuff, but easily forgotten.

California Girl by Jefferson Parker, is much more ambitious, its time scale stretching from the 1950s to the here and now, and its subject matter including local and national politics, social, cultural, and family history, religion, drugs, and the changes brought to the now-familiar Orange County region of California with the years. All this, and the headless corpse of a 19-year-old former beauty queen, makes for a dense and interesting read.

In the end, the necessities of the genre overwhelm the ambition, but for the first couple of hundred pages this is almost good beyond belief. You've got your four brothers, whose father works in the orange groves of california; one gets killed in Viet Nam, one becomes a drive-in evangelist, one a journalist, and one a cop. The novel begins with the brothers having a fight with another family from the wrong side of the tracks, and we get our first sight of the future murder victim: the cute and precocious five year old sister of the "bad" brothers.

Years later, she's been abused by her brothers and involved in underage drugs and alcohol, somewhat adopted by well to do local figures (including a Nixon aide), and becomes, briefly, Miss Tustin (part of The OC), before her appearance on a Playboy cover (clothed) sees her stripped of her title.

A year later her separated head and body turn up in an empty citrus warehouse and the cop brother has his first case as a homicide detective.

The back story is excellent, and I really enjoyed the painstaking attention to detail. The cop brother has to do his time at the county jail, and in uniform, before becoming a detective when he already feels a little bruised and past it. With cameo appearances from Nixon, Timothy Leary and Charles Manson, the background of late 60s California is ever-present, and the destruction of the orange groves and their replacement with housing estates makes you feel the loss that infects the main characters' lives.

It's a good murder mystery, too, and the only spoiler is the knowledge that it opens in the "here and now" with the journalist brother telling the cop brother that he arrested the wrong man. So you sort of know, or can easily guess, the ending, which is all tied up in a couple of chapters at the end. I'd have gladly waited for a sequel to learn about who really did it, if only the same justice could be done to the end of the story as there was to the beginning. But it's all DNA tests and blah blah blah. Shame.

California Girl is good, and well worth picking up, but it could have been great; like Orange County, it's despoiled by modern day stuff. I'd still recommend it, but the ending is a let down after the excellent beginning.