The Narrows

Overview

Private investigator Harry Bosch confronts the most terrifying killer he's ever known--the monster known to millions as the Poet.

FBI agent Rachel Walling finally gets the call she's dreaded for years. The Poet has returned. Years earlier she worked on the famous case tracking the serial killer who wove lines of poetry into his hideous crimes. Rachel has never forgotten the Poet--and apparently he has not forgotten her.

Former LAPD detective Harry Bosch gets a call, too, from an old friend whose husband recently died. The death appeared natural, but this man's ties to the hunt for the Poet make Harry dig deep. What he finds leads him into the most terrifying situation he has ever encountered.

Editorial Reviews

There's a gravitas to the mystery/thrillers of Michael Connelly, a bedrock commitment to the value of human life and the need for law enforcement pros to defend that value, that sets his work apart and above that of many of his contemporaries. That gravitas is in full force in Connelly's newest, and as nearly always in the work of this talented writer, it supports a dynamite plot, fully flowered characters and a meticulous attention to the details of investigative procedure. There are also some nifty hooks to this new Connelly: it features his most popular series character, retired L.A. homicide cop Harry Bosch, but it's also a sequel to his first stand-alone, The Poet (1996), and is only his second novel (along with The Poet) to be written in both first and third person. The first-person sections are narrated by Bosch, who agrees as a favor to the widow to investigate the death of Bosch's erstwhile colleague and friend Terry McCaleb (of Blood Work and A Darkness More Than Night). Bosch's digging brings him into contact with Rachel Walling, the FBI agent heroine of The Poet, and the third-person narrative concerns mostly her. Though generally presumed dead, the Poetthe serial killer who was a highly placed Fed and Walling's mentoris alive and killing anew, with, we soon learn, McCaleb among his victims and his sights now set on Walling. The story shuttles between Bosch's California and the Nevada desert, where the Poet has buried his victims to lure Walling. The suspense is steady throughout but, until a breathtaking climactic chase, arises more from Bosch and Walling's patient and inspired following of clues and dealing with bureaucratic obstacles than from slash-and-dash: an unusually intelligent approach to generating thrills. Connelly is a master and this novel is yet another of his masterpieces. (One-day laydown, May 3) Forecast: Connelly should hit #1 with this even without trying, but he and Little, Brown are going all out to support the novel, with plans including a 15-city author tour, a Today Show appearance and the distribution to media and bookstores of a DVD, Michael Connelly's Los Angeles, narrated by CSI star William Petersen. Simultaneous Time Warner Audio and large print edition. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Michael Connelly

MICHAEL CONNELLY decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing--a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews. After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. You can read this story at the Sun-Sentinel web site. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper echelons of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and landing him in the city about which Chandler, his literary hero, had written. After three years on the crime beat, Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published in 1992, and later won the Edgar Award for best first novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Connelly followed up with three more Bosch books, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote, before publishing The Poet, a thriller with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist, in 1996. In 1997, he went back to Bosch with Trunk Music, and in 1998 another non-series thriller, Blood Work, was published. Blood Work was inspired in part by a friend's receiving of a heart transplant and the attendant "survivor's guilt" the friend experienced, knowing that someone died in order that he have the chance to live. Connelly has been interested and fascinated by those same feelings as expressed by the survivors of the plane crash he wrote about years before. Blood Work is soon to be released as a major motion picture in early fall 2002 starring Clint Eastwood, Anjelica Houston, and Jeff Daniels. Angels Flight was released in 1999 and was another entry in the Harry Bosch series. Void Moon, was released in 2000, and introduced a new character, Cassie Black, a high-stakes Las Vegas thief. His 2001 release, A Darkness More Than Night, united Harry Bosch with Terry McCaleb from Blood Work, and was named one of the Best Books Of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times. Michael Connelly was also one of the creators, writers, and consulting producers of Level 9, a TV show about a task force fighting cyber crime that ran on UPN in the fall of 2000.. Connelly's books have won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Nero, Maltese Falcon (Japan), .38 Caliber (France), and Grand Prix (France) awards. He lives with his wife and daughter. - Bio courtesy of www.michaelconnelly.com

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Additional Info

Imprint

Hachette Book Group USA

Filesize

672.48 KB

Number of Pages

456

eBook ISBN

0316007919