Jim's Books

The Black Ice

Michael Connelly

The Black Ice
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ISBN: 9781409116868

Description

When a body is found in a hotel room, the press soon pick up on the case: it appears to be a missing LAPD narcotics officer, apparently gone to the bad. The rumours were that he had been selling a new drug called Black Ice that had been infiltrating LA from Mexico.

The LAPD are quick to declare the death as a suicide, but Harry Bosch is not so sure. There are odd, unexplained details from the crime scene which just don't add up. Fighting an attraction to the cop's widow, Bosch starts his own maverick investigation, which soon leads him over the borders, and into a dangerous world of shifting identities and deadly corruption...

Reviewed on 11th February 2015

The second book in the Harry Bosch series follows the detective as he investigates several crimes that he's not really meant to - including the death of one of his colleagues.

It's an interesting plot that keep moving at a good pace and hid the twists from me up to the minute, yet once they arrived they seemed obvious. However I didn't find the narrative gripping, and the character felt somewhat bland compared to some of the detectives in other ongoing series I read.

I felt quite disengaged from the setting. Perhaps it's because of my UK background but the cultural aspects of being a cop in the US just come across as unbelievable. Time and time again I found myself thinking 'but that wouldn't happen in the real world', and that's not something you want interrupting a novel, especially one that is supposed to be in the real world.

Overall, a little disappointed, though I'll keep at the series as it's still quite young at this point and there are a lot of books for it to grow into itself (which I got cheap in bulk).

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