Book Review: A Darkness More Than Night

Reviewed By: Jeff Kreider - RAM

A Darkness More Than Night     Amazon US PB Amazon US HC Amazon Canada PB Amazon Canada HC
Michael Connelly
Class/Genre:   Mystery   Police Procedural
Series: Harry Bosch # 7

The lead in this book is a profiler, Terry McCaleb. McCaleb, recent heart transplant recipient from Blood Work, has married. They have a new baby girl. They are living the quiet life on Catalina Island and he is doing fishing and boating charters to make a living. Terry is approached by an LAPD Detective to look into bizarre killing scene. He accepts. It soon becomes apparent that the killer is setting the stage to look like paintings by the medieval painter, Heironymous Bosch. Terry begins to suspect Harry Bosch, but before he has a chance to really get into it, the FBI gets into case, Terry is taken off and they go after Harry. Now Terry’s not so sure. It suddenly seems more likely that Bosch is being set up.

I enjoyed this a bunch. I thought the balance between McCaleb and Bosch was well done. I might have expected since both were "leads" in their own right, one or the other might take a back seat in this one, undermining the "super-hero" aspect of the characters. I thought Connelly did an excellent job avoiding that potential problem. Nevertheless, I haven’t had a really good Connelly-esc "Wow" ending for three books now (well, actually, two; Angels Flight had a wow ending, but I just didn’t like his conclusion). Ever since Blood Work, I have been wondering how he’d keep doing that. After all, the mechanics of the surprise ending require that the investigation is going down the wrong path until sometime late in the game everything comes together in a "WOW, where’d that come from?" ending. The problem, though, is to sustain that, book after book, your hero has to spend a good majority of the time being wrong! You’ll get this tendency to yawn through the earlier conclusions, just knowing that it is irrelevant. For me, Connelly avoided that problem in the earlier novels by providing plausibility to these "red herring" paths. There were a number of turns with The Poet and one reviewer had written, "I would have been equally happy with any one of the seven endings in this book". It seemed to me, that with very little effort, any one of those endings could have been the real one. Unlike a lot a red herrings, it wasn’t like there were reasons why they were wrong. It was that the actual reason or the "real" bad guy was also right for it and fit more clues.

Jeff Kreider - RAM

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Jeff Kreider - RAM

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