The Narrows

Rating:
Summary: One of the best this year
Review: So far this year, my favorites have been "The Narrows" (this guy in a slump is better than most on a roll),"Sunset and Sawdust" by Joe Lansdale and newcomer Harry Shannons "Memorial Day (A Mick Callahan Novel)" because of the lead character. Still, Connolly's Harry Bosch is the industry standard at this point, the one to beat--and at this point the weary homicide detective is still danged near unbeatable. Don't miss a master at the height of his talents.

Rating:
Summary: Redemption for Bosch and readers a like
Review: The Narrows is the latest Harry Bosch novel and the follow up to the Poet. The Narrows is a novel of deception, intrigue, and mystery. I definitely liked this book a lot more than Lost Light, I just felt that in Lost Light when Bosch was a private investigator that there was something missing, the politics of the department wasn't there, Edgar and Kiz weren't really along for the ride, and the feeling wasn't there like his previous novels, Lost Light was a turning point in Boschs life, but The Narrows is a great step towards Harrys redemption back onto the force. I'd rate the Narrows definitely 10/10 as it had a great plot, characters, and story behind the novel.

Rating:
Summary: Redemption for Bosch and readers a like
Review: The Narrows is the latest Harry Bosch novel and the follow up to the Poet. The Narrows was a novel of deception, intrigue, and mystery. I definitely liked this book a lot more than Lost Light, I just felt that in Lost Light when Bosch was a private investigator that there was something missing, the politics of the department wasn't there, Edgar and Kiz weren't really along for the ride, and the feeling wasn't there like his previous novels, Lost Light was a turning point in Boschs life, but The Narrows is a great step towards Harrys redemption back onto the force. I'd rate the Narrows definitely 10/10 as it had a great plot, characters, and story behind the novel.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Only Gets Better
Review: Looking for proof that Michael Connelly is the best mystery novelist today? The Narrows is evidence enough. On a very simple level, this is a mystery novel about a serial killer, "The Poet," and at least 14 murders attributed to him in this current wave of mayhem. It's also about a complex ex-LAPD homicide detective, Harry Bosch, and a frustrated FBI Behavioral Sciences Unit reject agent, Rachel Walling. The characters are complex, conflicted, believable, and stretched beyond what is expected but not beyond the potential of each soul. Even the two major locations, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, are drawn with such intensity and multi-faceted power that they almost become characters in themselves. The plot is intricate, surprising, and challenging -- but ultimately so finely composed and exquisitely executed that even the final shock in the last few pages, while completely unsuspected, still resonates with complete authenticity and credibility. And underneath everthing beats the heart of Michael Connelly's mission: to describe the deadly dance between good and evil, a dance that comes within a hair's breadth of consuming both, but ends with hope. The book opens with the powerful intensity of the threat of evil: "I knew that my life's mission would always take me to the places where evil waits, to the places where the truth that I might find would be an ugly and horrible thing. And still I went without pause. And still I went, not being ready for the moment when evil would come from its waiting place. When it would grab at me like an animal and take me down into the black water." And it ends with the dawn of hope: "I looked out at the city and thought it was beautiful. The rain had cleaned the sky out and I could see all the way to the San Gabriels and the snow-covered peaks beyond. The air seemed to be as clean and pure as the air breathed by the Gabrielenos and the padres so many years before. I saw what they had seen in the place. It was the kind of day you felt you could build a future on." And in between is the best fiction anywhere.

Rating:
Summary: AGREED - IT'S AWFUL - AND I'M A FAN
Review: I agree wholeheartedly with Mr. Glynn. This is not Michael Connelly's shining hour. There is no heart at the center of this novel and you don't really care if anyone lives or dies. Harry is just plain cruel to his late partner's fishing boat captain - why did he take an instant dislike to him? Why is Rachel the Poet's favorite? It is very arrogant of Mr. Connelly to assume that all the readers of THE NARROWS are going to fill in the blanks he leaves in the character development of the Poet - yes, he may have explained his psychosis in the book, THE POET, but the leap from OCD and having an overbearing father to being the kind of monster he brings back from the dead in THE NARROWS? Come on! This is bad TV! And what's up with Harry's ex-wife? Why has he written her off as such a whiny bitch? She hid the pregnancy from him, she moves to Las Vegas and becomes a professional gambler ... what next? The nanny is about the best thought-out and likable character in the book - that is sad. I long for Mr. Connelly's creative character development and interesting details. You cannot find sympathetic contract with anyone in the book.

Read one of Connelly's early books instead - maybe Angel Flight or Black Ice. Back when he could write. Sorry - he really is just phoning it in with THE NARROWS.

Rating:
Summary: truly awful
Review: I'm about 1/2 way through this awful piece of junk. I must have read "The Poet" to which this is sequel but I cannot remember. In fairness, I am also rereading "Gorky Park" and the contrast, at every level, is cruel to Mr. Connelly.
Some points: All characters are passive-aggressives, those where there is any development are also depressed, no wonder.
What is it with the weird names he gives female characters?
Clearly Mr. Connelly has to write X pages to fulfill his contract so we get Harry Bosch's thoughts on everything, no matter how irrelevant, and boy, are they are irrelevant! In fact, a hidden message in the book may by that Harry Bosch is a total idiot (wink, wink). He keeps complaining that the professionals are blowing him off (he's retired and bugging other people) and you can see why people hang up on him. He goes on about his car, his hotel room, his daughter,..... Mr. Connelly also spends a lot of time in repitition, describing scenes, arriving at the obvious after mucho circular speculation, etc. but that may be just to show how stupid Harry is.
The other main characters are "Rachel" who apparantly spent the last 10 years on an Indian reservation as punishment for something she did in the previous Poet novel. There is the Poet himself, a shadowy character who is fixing to kill them all gruesomely, I was going to say for reasons unknown but after 1/2 a book's exposure to Rachel, Harry, etc. I am cheering for Mr Poet and fully understand why he would want to cleanse the universe of such idiots.
As I leave them Harry and Rachel are bouncing around Las Vegas being followed by a squad of FBI'ers and the Poet. I expect that Rachel is going to get it because such depressed foreshadowing has to lead to something bad and Mr. Connelly can't kill off his mealticket. Harry has a daughter in Vegas and really gruesome things are possible in that direction including 20-30 pages of Harry's thoughts on father-daughter relationships.

Re Amazon's "Fine Print"; this product is not likely to cause injury or death but it may feel like it.

John Glynn


Rating:
Summary: awesome read!
Review: awesome read. read it in one day. Harry Bosch at
his best.

Rating:
Summary: Great sequel to the Poet.
Review: Michael Connelly's sequel to his hit "The Poet" is a worthy follow up that has a great lead character in Harry Bosch, Connelly's most interesting series character. The action is tease and the story is crisps and it's a worthy chapter in the Harry Bosch series. I rank it right up next to Angles Flight as one of the best in the series.




Rating:
Summary: A Very Worthy Sequel to "The Poet"
Review: Michael Connelly has devoted most of his writing career to solid crime procedurals starring LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch. Almost a decade ago, he took a detour to write "The Poet", a novel depicting FBI agent Rachel Walling's nationwide pursuit of a serial killer who exacts revenge on cops and then disguises the crimes as suicides. It was a work every bit as intriguing as Thomas Harris at his best, and its ending left the door wide open for a sequel. In "The Narrows", Connelly brings both protagonists together to solve the untimely death of yet another name from the past, retired FBI agent Terry McCaleb of "Blood Work".

Crossover stories by any author put me on alert as I'm afraid that I'm about to be served a comic book gimmick (what if Superman and Batman worked together?). Connelly had already somewhat faltered when introducing Bosch and McCaleb in "A Darkness More than Night". However, "The Narrows" corrects that earlier book's mistakes and provides a thrilling conclusion to the Poet's tale.

The action is immediately underway and well-paced as always. Connelly does his usual great job of starting with events that initially seem unconnected and then credibly meshing them through the detective work of his characters. The suspense builds from The Poet's very creepy efforts to place himself back in the FBI's sights through his engame of revenge on his pursuers. The resulting game of cat-and-mouse and its climax(es) are true page-turners.

I'm still not convinced that I like Bosch's side being told in first-person (a convention that began with his last Bosch novel, "Lost Light") because it detracts from Connelly's gifts with wording. As you'd expect, Bosch's thoughts and feelings are very economical, which leads to sparse prose. Scenes from other characters' perspectives flow very nicely in third-person voice.

The pairing of Bosch and Walling is more natural than that of Bosch and McCaleb was in "A Darkness More than Night". This success is partly due to their natural similarities. For example, Walling now finds herself a pariah within the FBI despite her excellent skills, very similar to Bosch's situation throughout most of his tenure at LAPD. During the course of the investigation, they achieve some trust and intimacy, but not so much that the characterization of either is compromised. This delicate balance that Connelly maintains here is what puts this crossover way ahead of his earlier attempt.

But the real trick that Connelly pulls off in this one is the mystery itself. You can't call the book a whodunit because you immediately know that the Poet is back - he advertises it himself. So why read the book? Read it for the true question that's skillfully saved for the ending surprise: not so much whodunit but what-did-he-really-do?

Without revealing any spoilers, the ending provides not only a powerful surprise but also further development in Bosch's life that career fans have surely been itching for. The result is very satisfying for "The Narrows" on its own and also opens up great possibilities for Bosch's future tales.

If you discovered "The Poet" as a one-shot and are looking forward to this sequel, I recommend reading at least some of the Harry Bosch series and "Blood Work" first. The absolute minimum chronology would be "The Black Echo", "The Last Coyote", "Trunk Music" and "City of Bones". You can still make sense of this book without a complete background on Bosch; you'll just be cheating yourself out of a lot of great mystery fiction.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best Bosch books yet
Review: Detective Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch and FBI agent Rachel Walling are brought together to investigate the death of former FBI agent Terry McCaleb as well as the possible reemergence of serial killer Bob Backus, aka The Poet. We also get a dose of Bosch's daughter, his ex-wife, Kiz Rider, Buddy Lockridge, and McCaleb's widow. In the world of Michael Connelly characters, this is a family affair.

Given the integration of previously disparate storylines, you might expect this novel to fail, or to succeed only as a gimmick, in the same way that an Abbott and Costello meet the Three Stooges special is destined for mediocrity.

However, I'm happy to say, this book works as a novel, and is one of the most enjoyable in the series to date. To me, Connelly's biggest shortcomings are that he tends to include a plot twist too many and that his walk-through of investigatory procedurals can become so convoluted that the forward motion of the plot becomes mired in details. Neither of those shortcomings is evident here.

One of the remarkable things about the Bosch character is that, in every novel, we see another layer of his humanity. There are so many dimensions to what makes him tick that he really seems like a living, breathing person. And yet, he's a person unlike any that we've ever known; driven, relentlessly drawn to the act of chasing criminals like a shark pursuing prey. And like a shark, Bosch never stops moving; if he did, he might die.

In this novel, Bosch's pursuit of justice is intermixed with visits to his daughter Maddie, and with his temptation to rejoin the LAPD. His investigations lead him to a mass grave and to a Nevada brothel, among other places. He finds himself in conflict with the FBI, which is more concerned with the FBI's image than with a speedy, relentless pursuit of the victim.

About half of the novel is told in Bosch's words, and half in a third-person narrative focused on Rachel Walling. There are also occasional bits of story that center around the villain. Despite these bits, and some pondering by Bosch, we never really get a feel for the villain as a character; he's just the daily special on Bosch's plate. I didn't feel strongly about the divergent narrative one way or the other; I will say that Bosch's character voice isn't much different from Connelly's writing style.

The writing is very well done, and the novel is well-paced. We get to see the agents engage in some interesting field work, and Bosch's attention to detail is fun to see. Yet, the story is more sparse than most of Connelly's work, with a more direct path from point A to point B. I think it works very well. Moreso than in any other Bosch book, I liked the ending. Endings are hard; Connelly got it right this time.

I highly recommend this book, although I wouldn't choose it as my first Connelly novel. You should read a couple other books so that you can appreciate the secondary characters based on their histories in past novels.