The Concrete Blonde

Overview

Michael Connelly's Edgar Award-winning debut, The Black Echo, introduced a bold new voice in crime writing -- along with a sensational new hero, maverick LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch. The Concrete Blonde opens as Bosch is hauled into court as the chief defendant in a civil suit against the LAPD. The plaintiffs: the family of the "Dollmaker," a notorious serial killer who Bosch shot during an arrest three years ago. Their allegation: Bosch killed the wrong man -- an accusation that becomes horrifyingly plausible when a new body turns up that has all the hallmarks of a Dollmaker slaying.

The Concrete Blonde combines the hard-boiled energy of Elmore Leonard, the chilling suspense of Thomas Harris, the legal twists of Scott Turow, and the breakneck plotting of Laurence Sanders in an exciting and satisfying novel that signals a new level in Connelly's career.

Editorial Reviews

In this fiendishly plotted combination of courtroom drama and police procedural, Connelly's LAPD detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch, introduced in the Edgar-winning The Black Echo , is up against the law as well as his superiors. The widow of Norman Church, a serial killer identified as the Dollmaker, whom Bosch shot to death four years earlier, is suing Bosch on the grounds that he violated her husband's civil rights. Strong but not conclusive evidence linked Church to the serial murders and the case was closed, although Bosch was demoted for not following proper procedures. Here, just before the trial targeting Bosch as a reckless cowboy who shot the wrong man gets underway, the body of perhaps another Dollmaker victim is unearthed from the concrete floor of a burnt-out pool hall. Is the real Dollmaker still alive, or is a copycat killer on the loose? Connelly deftly parcels out clues and possibilities while juggling subtle and detailed courtroom scenes with no-nonsense police investigations that turn up new evidence about the original case. A Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times , he adroitly laces the plot with twists and turns based on details drawn from Bosch's previous adventures. The results of this care show on every page, all to the reader's benefit.
Copyright 1994 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.

Customer Reviews

There are no customer reviews available at this time. To add your review, Register or Sign In to your account using our free eBook Library Software.

Additional Info

Imprint

Hachette Book Group USA

Filesize

1.19 MB

Number of Pages

512

eBook ISBN

031600829X

Awards

• Dilys Award