Because Ideas Matter...
The faculty and staff of Butler University's College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences presents
Recommended Readings
The Black Box
by Michael Connelly, Little, Brown 2012
Reviewed by Larry Riggs
This new entry in Connelly's Harry Bosch
series follows the always productive formula: Bosch's unwavering
commitment to the principle that every homicide victim matters
carries him beyond usual police procedures and into conflict with
the bureaucratic politics of the LAPD. As in the previous book in
the series, Bosch is on special retirement-transition status, and
he is working cold cases. Here, he is assigned to look into a
twenty-year-old murder that occurred during the 1992 Rodney King
riots in LA, and on which he was, originally, the investigating
detective. In the chaos of the riots, Bosch had to move quickly on
to the next homicide, and this murder of a Danish photo-journalist
was handed off to a riot-crimes task force and never solved. Bosch
finds that new ballistics technology has turned a bit of physical
evidence into a real lead, and he searches for the "black box": the
fact at the heart of the case that will reveal its coherence. The
search for this key evidence leads him back into the riots and,
beyond, into the First Gulf War and the power structure in
California's Central Valley. Refusing to yield to pressures from
above and from his own personal life, Bosch goes on "vacation" in
order to investigate more freely. Like all lonely renegade cop
heroes of fiction, Bosch uses his harsh, extra-constitutional
methods only against the truly guilty, so his devastating victory
over the murderer is satisfying. A very good read.
- Larry Riggs is Professor of French at Butler University.