The Burning Room

I've read more than a few of Michael Connelly's books, but just a couple of those featuring Harry Bosch, his main character. Bosch is a jaded, almost-near-retirement detective working the cold case department. He's been assigned a new partner, Lucy Soto, a young Latina who has become something of a celebrity for shooting a couple of perps. Now they are investigating the death of a Mariachi musician, many years after he was shot.
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This is The Burning Room, the latest Bosch novel, and to be honest, I kind of felt Connelly was just going through the motions. It's a procedural, heavily so, as many aspects of police work are explained. This can be great, as most of us have no idea how a typical police detective goes about his or her work, but at times it seemed mechanical.

Bosch and Soto determine that the Mariachi who was shot and died years later of his injuries was not the intended victim, and this leads them to Tulsa, Oklahoma and then a hunting range in the California hinterlands. Soto, though, has another case that fuels her. When she was a child she survived a fire that killed several other children, and the case is still open. When Bosch catches her copying the case files, he agrees to help her.

I will give Connelly one thing--in lesser hands, these two cases would have somehow connected to each other. In fact, I kind of waited for it, but no, these cases are independent. The arson case leads them to the desert compound of an anti-government nut and a convent hear the Mexican border. Neither of the cases wraps to their satisfaction.

Connelly, who used to cover crime for the L.A. Times, certainly has the authenticity down, but I didn't feel this book pulsing with any life. Bosch is kind of spinning his wheels waiting for retirement, dealing with an obnoxious lieutenant and trying to get to know his teenage daughter better. Soto is an interesting character, who is eager to learn the ropes but sometimes acts too impulsively.

The book doesn't get very literary. At times we get to hear Bosch's thoughts: "Bosch sat down on a bench and enjoyed the view like the other tourists on the promontory. But his thoughts were or murder and the kind of people who pay others to their competitors and enemies. The ultimate narcissists who think that the world revolves around only them. He wondered how many were out there among the billion lights that glowed up at him through the haze."

If you're looking to start reading Connelly's books, I wouldn't start with this one. I loved The Poet and Scarecrow and Void Moon (none of them are Bosch books, and all of them have a disturbing sense of evil in the villains that is missing here) as well as the two Lincoln Lawyer books. Start with those.