The Black Echo - Michael Connelly

I didn’t plan it this way, but I do find it rather appropriate that my first book review of the new year is of the book that introduced one of the most popular fictional detectives in recent memory to the world. The Black Echo, published in 1992, was the first of Michael Connelly’s “Bosch novels.” Now, depending on how you count them - and it does get a little bit tricky - there are at least 26 novels featuring Harry Bosch. Most recently, Bosch has been teamed up with a new, younger partner called Renée Ballard, but beginning in 2008, Bosch has also been paired with his famous half-brother in four of the “Lincoln Lawyer” novels. In fact, just this morning I stopped by a Target store to purchase a copy of last November’s The Law of Innocence, the latest Lincoln Lawyer novel in which the brothers join forces. 

Interestingly, Hieronymous Bosch is already forty years old when readers first meet him. Harry even lives alone in the same stilted-house in Los Angeles that readers have come to know so well over the last almost-thirty years. But most tellingly, he is already in trouble with his police superiors, a state of being that will become the norm for Harry in many, if not most, of the next two-dozen books. Too, many of the characters that will become mainstays in later books are first introduced - although not always in a positive way - in The Black Echo. 

It is in this first book that readers learn enough of his backstory to understand why Harry is so ready to fight the system and why he is such a loner and a rebel. The experiences that Bosch had as a tunnel rat during the war in Vietnam play a crucial role in The Black Echo, but readers also learn enough here about the detective’s mother and his boyhood to understand why he still carries such deep emotional scars.

The Black Echo begins when Bosch gets called to work a possible crime scene at Lake Hollywood where a dead body has been discovered inside a large drainage pipe. It is likely that the dead body belongs to an addict who has suffered an overdose, but cause of death will need to be determined before that can be confirmed. After Bosch has had time to study the scene and the body for a few minutes, he realizes two things: the death is probably not accidental and he knows the victim, a fellow Vietnam War tunnel rat - someone Harry  helped into rehab a couple of years earlier but had not spoken with since. 

That’s when things start to get complicated and Harry begins to realize that there is more to this case than some very powerful people want to see exposed. Harry Bosch, though, is not a man who can easily be stopped from carrying an investigation through, no matter where that investigation may lead him or who tries to shut him up. He continues working the case, picking and choosing what information he will share with others involved in the investigation, despite the two Internal Affairs cops who trail him all the while in hopes that they can finally claim his badge as a trophy. Harry is just not a real popular guy with the LAPD or the FBI.

Bottom Line: The Black Echo is an excellent introduction to Harry Bosch and the Los Angeles police department environment he must survive if he wants to do his job. I can tell you from experience that you do not necessarily have to read this first book in the series before jumping into the series at some later point, but it will certainly help you understand the character if you do. This is particularly true for the Vietnam-based portion of Bosch’s backstory. The Black Echo is an impressive debut novel. Even more impressive is the way that Michael Connelly has lived up to all the promise shown in the novel. 

Michael Connelly book photo