The Crime World of Michael Connelly by David Geherin

Author:David Geherin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2022-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Drop (2011)

Bosch has a pair of unrelated cases to solve in The Drop, a situation Connelly compares to a double helix, with the strands winding around each other but not intersecting. Each case, however, offers further reflections on two of Bosch’s recurring concerns: high jingo and the nature of evil.

Bosch and partner David Chu are assigned a case dating back to 1989, when ­nineteen-year-old Lily Price was raped and stabbed to death. Thanks to new technology, the DNA found on a drop of blood on her neck has now been identified as belonging to Clayton Pell, who has spent six years in prison for rape and is currently living in a halfway house. The only problem is that Pell would have been eight years old at the time of the murder. Was there a ­mix-up in DNA testing at the state forensic lab or some other possible explanation for how his blood ended up on Lily Price?

The story Pell recounts when Bosch meets up with him at the halfway house is truly horrifying. He reveals that at age eight, he was regularly sexually assaulted and frequently beaten by his mother’s boyfriend, a man he knew only as Chill. Bosch concludes that the belt the killer used to strangle Lily Price was likely the same belt he used to beat Clayton Pell. That’s how his blood got on her neck. Now he has to find the man named Chill.

In his second case, ­long-time nemesis Irvin Irving has asked him to investigate the death of his son George. A consultant for hire who uses his connections to his father to get his clients access to important people in City Hall, he died after falling from the balcony of his room at the Chateau Marmont hotel. Hours earlier, he had checked into room 704, where he and his wife had celebrated their honeymoon (and where Connelly wrote much of the novel). Since being forced out of the department, Irving has been elected to the city council, where he has sought to get revenge against his former department by voting against every proposal to raise salary and to cut one hundred million dollars from the overtime budget. He also has enough muscle to get Bosch assigned to the case. Even though he doesn’t like him, he respects his relentlessness and integrity. Bosch immediately suspects the case will involve high jingo, i.e., political pressure. Does Irving intend to use what he finds out about his son’s death against the department?

George Irving’s death appears to be a simple case of suicide until Bosch finds a series of four crescent moons, each about two inches high, on his shoulder. He recognizes the pattern as one often left by the large military watches worn by many of the LAPD cops who employed the chokehold to render a person temporarily unconscious. That technique was later banned by the department after it was linked to several deaths. Bosch soon has a suspect and a motive for a possible murder: a former LAPD cop who was fired for overusing the chokehold.

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