The Drop By Michael Connelly
Little brown & Co, $27.99, 388 pages, ISBN 978-0-316-06941-0
The Drop is the kind of novel other writers wish they could write. Although it is his 27th, most of which have featured the hard-driving Los Angeles detective Heironymous “Harry” Bosch, each and every one stands on its own. The character remains fresh. By that I mean Connelly’s plots are always new, and never formulaic. That’s when, after reading several novels featuring the same person, they become predictable. There’s a kind of sameness to them: they’re boring, which is never the case with Michael Connelly.
In The Drop, Bosch is near the end of his career with the LAPD. He’s put on the Deferred Retirement Option Plan, or DROP. In three years, he’ll be forced into retirement. Eager to close as many cases as possible before he is forced to give up his badge, Bosch is on the Open Unsolved, or cold case squad. His assignment, to solve a twenty-year-old rape and murder case, in which new DNA evidence has come back, implicating a man who was only eight years old when the crime was committed. The case implies corruption in the new crime lab. Then, on the same morning he gets the sensitive cold case, another hot, live one involving a city councilman’s son in a possible suicide is dropped on him like a thousand-pound bomb. It has political overtones that could lead all the way to the top of City Hall.
The two cases intertwine like a pair of love-struck boa constrictors and will keep you nailed in your favorite reading place for hours. The details of each case become more twisted with each new revelation, making The DROP one of Connelly’s best-ever novels in a long string of ‘em. This one’s great!
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