Review of Walter Mosley's Rose Gold

Rose Gold by Walter Mosley

Like Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes, Walter Mosley killed off his protagonist in 2007's Blonde Faith. Whether the author just needed a vacation from his most popular detective, or had really intended to drop him forever, he was persuaded to relent. Little Green was published in 2013, and Rose Gold, the latest in the series, was released yesterday by Doubleday. I was fortunate to get a pre-release copy for review, and am very glad the author decided to resurrect the series; he has lost none of his touch.

Easy has his hands full in this story, set not too long after the first Watts riots in 1965, that turbulent period of Vietnam veterans and protesters, free love, black militarism, and hippies. It was a time when everyone had passionate opinions and society seethed with sit-ins and riots. Easy, a black decorated World War II veteran, usually tries to keep a low profile; the racial equality promised by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hadn't yet had much effect on the lives of blacks in Los Angeles.

For a change, the Los Angeles police acknowledge needing Easy's help, and are prepared to pay for it. Roger Frisk, Special Assistant to the Chief of Police, approaches Easy, who is in the midst of moving house, and asks him to find Rosemary Goldsmith, daughter of a millionaire arms dealer. Rosemary has disappeared from her college dorm room, likely in the company of a militant young black boxer named Bob Mantle, who is calling himself Uhuru Nolicé. Mantle is wanted for the shooting of three police officers during the course of a robbery. Whether Rosemary went with him willingly or was kidnapped is a matter of conjecture. Frisk wants Easy to find Mantle and recover the girl if possible, but under no circumstances to contact her family.

But the L.A. police are not the only people interested in finding Rose. First the FBI shows up and tells Easy to drop the case, but to report any results from inquiries he has made to them and not to the L.A. police. When two State Department officials come by to say that he is interfering with national security and tell him to stay out of the case, Easy starts a slow burn. Despite his instructions to the contrary, he visits the girl's father. Foster Goldsmith will neither confirm nor deny that his daughter has been kidnapped. He tells Easy, "I taught Rose to make her own bed when she was six years old. I told her that when a man or woman makes their own bed they sleep in it too." Whew, tough love in these circumstances!

One of the most charming things about this series is the network of friends that Easy has managed to build. Rich or poor, on either side of the law, many people have reason to remember him kindly. Part of the reason is that he is willing to do favors for others. Melvin Suggs, Easy's informal contact in the police department, has been suspended. Melvin had arrested a woman for passing counterfeit money, but then fell in love with her. Their affair may cost him his job, even though Mary has since left him. In exchange for information, Mel wants Easy to find Mary, regardless of the consequences.

By the time a ransom has been demanded––with one of Rosemary's fingers as earnest––Easy has begun to suspect that Bob Mantle, her apparent kidnapper, is being made a scapegoat by a number of parties. Rosemary is a wild child with a troubled past, who would love to publicly embarrass her father. When a robbery at a liquor store occurs, the tape shows Rosemary, holding a gun, robbing the clerk, while Bob timidly guards the door.

The story is loosely based on the Patty Hearst case of the same era. Patty, a daughter of publishing mogul Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a self-styled left-wing revolutionary group, which she later joined. She was convicted of bank robbery and served time in prison, but is still thought by many to have been a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, in which the kidnapped bond closely with their captors.

In this series Mosley––with some humor and without lecturing or excessive bitterness––presents clearly the difficulty of living in America as a second-class citizen. In each of the Easy Rawlins books, my blood pressure spikes several times at the casual dismissiveness or outright cruelty of bigotry. They are not the most comfortable reads for an empathetic person, but the perspective always gives me something to think about. Mosley's plots are complicated, but tightly woven. His characters are vivid, and after several books I feel that I know them. For those reading Easy Rawlins for the first time, this is not the best place to start; each book in the series builds on the network of friends and obligations that Easy established in earlier books. For those of us who remember those times, Rose Gold is tightly-woven, bittersweet reminder of a turbulent and exhilarating era.

Note: I received a free copy of Rose Gold for review.

Camp Out with These Books

Conveniently for my daughter, she's rarely home when I want to throttle her. I'm getting ready for a camping trip with friends, so I pulled out our five-person tent. Except it's not our five-person tent. I've never seen this tent before in my life. The last time I saw our tent is when I handed it to my daughter, who took it to a weekend music festival, the kind where there are thousands of tents being taken down on the last day, and your daughter brings back a tent that's not nearly as large or as nice as the one she and her friends originally set off with in her car.

That particular tent may be jinxed. On the way home after purchasing it, I asked my two then-small kids not to tell their dad how expensive it was. It was erected in the living room, and the three of us were looking at it proudly when Hubby/Daddy got home. "Wow, that's a really nice tent. I bet it was pricey, like a hundred bucks," he said. "Yeah, something like that," I smiled. "No, Mommy, it was $xxx.xx," advised our daughter, the overly truthful, little Miss Know-It-All. "Hey, Mommy told us not to tell Daddy how much it cost," scolded her big brother, who liked nothing more than correcting her. Luckily, Hubby/Daddy has a sense of humor, and he just laughed.

Thinking about our jinxed tent today, I hope the people now camping with it are not plagued by blizzards or high winds, since the tent's bad-weather cover remains in our garage. The instructions are there, too. Let me know if you're the (un)lucky person in possession of the tent that formerly belonged to us, and I'll tell you how to set it up. For everyone else, I'll stick to suggesting books you'd be lucky to have for reading in your tent.

After you've doused yourself with mosquito repellent, pitched camp away from the poison oak, and secured your food out of the bears' reach, take refuge in the mean streets of Los Angeles with black homicide detective Elouise ("Lou") Norton in Rachel Howzell Hall's Land of Shadows (Forge, June 2014). Lou's current case involves the death of 17-year-old Monique Darson in a gentrifying development, but Lou sees similarities to her own older sister Tori's unsolved disappearance 25 years earlier. As her investigation proceeds and grows more dangerous, Lou becomes convinced that solving Monique's murder will also close Tori's cold case. Her superiors aren't so sure.

Rachel Howzell Hall
(Getty Images)

Most of the book is narrated by Lou. It's a pleasure to follow Lou as she recalls days leading up to Tori's vanishing and its aftermath, and she deals with her new partner from Colorado, Colin Taggert, who dresses like he's "going to a bar mitzvah at the Ponderosa" and does a bites-his-lip-and-smiles thing when he surveys the attractive Lou. Lou rolls her eyes, although her marriage to Greg, in Japan on business, is wilting. How many "Sorry, Baby" Porsche Cayenne SUVs does a woman want from her cheating husband? Lou is sassy, smart, and tough; writer Hall knows Los Angeles inside out, and she has keen insight into human nature and complex family relationships. This is a great start to a new series. Don't worry about the looming "Z" for Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone: meet the LAPD's Lou Norton.

Okay, I love Lou, and I look forward to seeing more of her in the future, but one should spend only so much time with law enforcement while camping. After all, isn't the point of spending a few nights hanging out with wild animals in the forest to escape civilization? Let's plot a murder (ineptly, it's the funnest way) with Buddy Sandifer, a used-car dealer in the Midwest and father of a teenage son heavily into sex manuals, who wants his wife dead so he can marry his buxom blonde mistress, Laverne, in Sneaky People. This terrific black comic noir, set in the '30s, is written by Thomas Berger, who also wrote the picaresque novel, Little Big Man, which starred Dustin Hoffman when it was adapted for the screen.

When you've had your fill of gazing at the stars and eating s'mores around the fire, light the tent lantern and crawl into your sleeping bag with a book. Now, the book must be absolutely riveting to keep your mind off how incredibly claustrophobic it all is. Think about it: you are lying not only inside a small tent, you are encased in a narrow bag. But don't think about it too much. If the enclosed space is getting to you, and you're in danger of bursting into shrieks and running amok through the camp, you might find it helpful to stuff cotton between each of your toes so they don't touch each other while you're in your sleeping bag. (I have no idea if this actually works because it just occurred to me; however, doesn't the theory behind this suggestion seem sound to you?)

My specific book recommendation depends on the phase of the moon. If there's a full moon, don't just howl at it––read Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Please don't tell me you don't like science fiction. There are certain books even non-sci fi lovers should enjoy, and this is one of them. In it, indentured lunar colony members produce wheat for consumption on Earth. It's 2075 when some of them, aided by a computer named Mike, decide to stage a revolution.

The word "revolution" reminds me of the French (Happy Bastille Day!), which reminds me of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. (Trust me, I am working my way toward a point.) If there's not a full moon, but an inky sky glittering with constellations, I suggest you read Alfred Bester's darkly comic oddball tale, The Stars My Destination. You'll see the parallels to Dumas' 1844 adventure masterpiece as Gulliver ("Gully") Foyle, Mechanic's Mate 3rd Class and only man alive on the wrecked and marooned spaceship Nomad, vows revenge against the owners and crew of the Vorga, a passing space vessel that ignores his distress signals. It's a furious, obsessional murderous pursuit through time and space that should distract you from the confinement of your tent and sleeping bag.

I would be grossly irresponsible if I didn't close with a post-apocalyptic horror thriller for your nighttime read. M. R. Carey's The Girl with All the Gifts (Orbit/Hachette, June 2014) is that––and an on-the-road (à la Cormac McCarthy's The Road) and coming-of-age novel, too. Its heroine is a 10-year-old named Melanie, whom Dr. Caldwell calls "our little genius." Melanie lives alone in her cell in a cellblock full of other children. There are no windows, and the children have no memories of any other existence. Five days a week, Sgt. Parks trains a gun on them while they seat themselves in wheelchairs, are strapped in, and are wheeled into a classroom for lessons. Melanie loves her teacher, Miss Justineau, and hopes when she grows up, she can move to Beacon, the closest city in that part of England. Soon thereafter, events take a turn that puts Melanie, Miss Justineau, Sgt. Parks, Pvt. Gallagher, and Dr. Caldwell on the road to Beacon. That's all I want to divulge about the plot and characters.

M. R. Carey

Despite its flaws (clichéd characters and plot elements and an over-long 403 pages), I enjoyed this book for its creepy atmosphere, intricate plotting, examination of our world and a dystopian future, the relationships between the characters, and the chance to see Melanie come into her own. Pandora, who opened a box and gave her gifts to the world, would have enjoyed it, too. When the owls start hooting, pull out Carey's novel, and dig in.

Happy camping and reading, everybody.

Killer Music

What is it that first brings to mind the sense that that there is much more time behind you than ahead of you? It's not the first silver amongst the gold, or the arms growing shorter overnight; no it's the fact that one of the first bits of mail you get on your 50th birthday is an invitation from the AARP to join the over-the-hill club. Forget about the fact that it might be 20 years until you can retire; in some circles you are officially a senior.

Get your motor runnin'

Expecting this invitation in Nathan Walpow's One Last Hit makes Joe Portugal decide he needs to shake up his life. Just the other night during a heady Aerosmith concert, Joe was taking advantage of a different application for a plant, while enjoying Steven Tyler’s antics with the microphone, and he got the idea that it was time to shake off 30 years of a somewhat unexciting life, dust off his Gibson SG guitar and try one last time to be what he once wanted to be when he grew up––a rock star.

Nathan Walpow introduced Joe Portugal in a gem of a small series, which begins with The Cactus Club Killings. Joe is an actor who lives and works in Los Angeles and keeps busy with mostly commercial work. He also happens to be a cactus aficionado, but enjoys working with plants of all kinds. When he finds himself a person of interest in the killing of the president of the Culver City Cactus Club, he finds that he also has a green thumb for investigating murder.

Head out on the highway

After practicing for a few months, Joe begins to feel that he can call himself a guitar player once again and that maybe he can start looking for some of the members of his old group. There were five of them altogether: Lenny on keyboards, Wozniak on bass, Washington on drums, and Toby Bonner on lead guitar and vocals, with Joe himself on rhythm guitar. A singer, Bonnie Morgenlender, rounded out the quintet. They called themselves The Platypuses. Ah, the summer of '68.

Yet somehow, before Portugal makes a move, he finds Lenny and Wozniak looking for him with some of the same motives on their minds. Coincidence? Joe would like to think so, but something is out of tune. Back in the days of the summer of love, the group took off well but, like many small groups, it was the vocal duo of Toby and Bonnie that claimed the limelight and garnered the praise, the contract and the one-hit wonder. Before Portugal can begin the big search, members of the group are being shot at and they haven't even started singing yet.

Lookin' for adventure

The last person from the group still missing is the lead singer, Toby, and most people think he is still isolated at his secret desert hideaway. Portugal is one of the few people who has been there, but his memory of the area is vague, somewhat like 8-tracks in the sand.

Sometimes there are good reasons why Sam shouldn't play it again. Joe can't think of any that apply to his group, but after he himself has been in the crosshairs he has a mission.

Portugal keeps one step ahead of whoever would rather kill the band than see them perform again, and takes the reader on a not-exactly-magical mystery tour of old bands and esoteric music. This story has a background melody about the girl who got away, grilled cheese sandwiches, skipping the light fandango, one VW Beetle after another, cookie tins full of photographs, a hideaway in the desert, midlife crises, eclectic after-hours clubs, dreams, high-speed chases and voicemail hell. I think there is one more in this series and I have it safe in my possession.

And whatever comes our way

Walpow has a rapid, breezy, conversational-type delivery that is so comfortable it makes you right at home. I found a scattering of nicely upbeat humor. The book is also fun for fans of The Who, because it is filled with references to the group. Each chapter is titled after a Who song.

Note: Headings are lyrics from Steppenwolf's "Born to Be Wild."

Review of Walter Mosley's Little Green

Little Green by Walter Mosley

On Monday, our country celebrated the life and achievements of Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights leader assassinated on April 4, 1968. Were Dr. King alive today, I think he'd share my enjoyment of some novels about the struggle for equality: Attica Locke's Black Water Rising (Harper, 2009), which delves into the campus protest movement past of a young black lawyer who is placed in jeopardy later, when he and his wife witness a murder. James McBride's The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books/Penguin Group USA, 2013), about abolitionist John Brown, was reviewed here.

I don't doubt King would appreciate Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins, the black Walter Mosley character who fought in World War II and moved from Houston, Texas, to Los Angeles, where he opens an office with a sign on the door that says "EASY RAWLINS—RESEARCH AND DELIVERY." Years later, the sign stays the same, but Easy obtains a valid PI license after he's earned the grudging respect of the Los Angeles chief of police, who sees him as a bridge to L.A.'s black community.

I thought we had seen the last of Easy when he takes an intentional, drunken drive off a cliff on the Pacific Coast Highway in 2007's Blonde Faith. When Easy tells us, "I came half-awake, dead and dreaming" to begin Mosley's twelfth series book, Little Green (Doubleday, 2013), it's two months later in 1967. Easy has no sooner staggered out of his coma when one of the most feared men in Los Angeles, his best friend, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, asks for a favor. Nineteen-year-old Evander "Little Green" Noon had gone to the Sunset Strip, where he called his mother, Timbale, to tell her he'd met a hippie woman and would come home after they'd gone to a club to listen to music. Evander never reappeared and Ray, who feels responsible for the boy since killing his father, asks Easy to find him.

Fortified by swigs of healer Mama Jo's elixir, Gator's Blood (read about how it affects Easy's body and soul and then tell me you wouldn't kill to get your hands on some), Easy tracks Evander's path through Los Angeles's Summer of Love. Easy is aided by a young female hippie, Ray and other friends such as Martin Martins, Jackson Blue and Frenchman Jean-Paul Villard. While the missing-person hunt and the extortion case Easy handles at the request of Blue are interesting, what makes Little Green and the entire Easy Rawlins series unique is its narrator, a good and tough black man, who shares his existential thinking, guides us through his black community and shows us how a black man in 1950s and '60s Los Angeles handles interactions with whites.

There is one white cop Easy trusts: Detective Melvin Suggs––but most white Los Angeles cops can't be trusted by blacks on sight. As Easy shows Evander's picture to people on the Strip, he's reminded of black towns in Mississippi and Louisiana, where workers gathered to drink homemade liquor, dance, laugh and cry because they were under the thumb of racism. He says the hippies on the Strip feel under the gun, too. They are outraged by Vietnam and ostracized because of their clothes and habits. Unlike people in older times, they feel they can change the world that tries to hold them down. After some whites come to intervene when cops hassle him and another black man on a street corner, and another white sticks up for him during a dispute in a diner, Easy feels hopeful:

When the Watts Riots had ended I saw the divisions form among the nonwhite races of L.A. I'd also seen a split in our own community, where brother turned against brother and corrupt city officials stepped in to take their revenge. But in that hippie diner there was the hint of something hopeful. There were white people realizing for the first time what it was like to be shunned and segregated, fired for no reason and arrested because of the way they looked.

It's an insightful trip back to 1967 with Easy. He might have driven off a cliff in one world, only to wake up in the beginning of a new world.

Review of Michael Connelly's The Gods of Guilt

The Gods of Guilt by Michael Connelly

If you saw Matthew McConaughey play hustling criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer, you're not the only one. So many Los Angeles lawyers now have an office in the backseat of a Lincoln Town Car that Mickey comes out of the courthouse and climbs into the wrong Lincoln. That, and the opening courtroom scene, are two of the few comic moments in Michael Connelly's fifth series book, The Gods of Guilt (Little, Brown, December 2013).

Mickey has become increasingly melancholy since 2011's The Fifth Witness, when he ran for district attorney and lost (though his fans thank God for that). His teenage daughter, Hayley, lives with his first ex-wife and has refused to see him since a client he got off later drove drunk and killed two people. Mickey wonders how he can expect her to forgive him when, deep down, he doesn't forgive himself.

In addition to this personal angst, Mickey deals with a law practice in decline. The economy has forced him to let associates go, and only Jennifer Aronson remains, working on bankruptcies and foreclosures, while Mickey scrounges for criminal clients. When a "paying customer" accused of murder calls, Mickey knows it's likely he can make his "whole nut for the year."

The paying customer is Andre La Cosse, a man who designs websites and enables the operation of prostitutes (a "cyberpimp"). The strange thing is that the prostitute Andre is accused of killing, Giselle Dallinger, told him that if he ever needs a lawyer, Mickey Haller is the best. It turns out Giselle is actually a former client Mickey thought he knew well, Gloria Dayton (from The Lincoln Lawyer), though he didn't know everything he should have. In order to defend Andre, Mickey needs to investigate Gloria––as both victim of murder and long-ago accused.

In addition to his associate, Jennifer, Mickey is assisted by the usual gang of employees: case manager (and ex-wife No. 2) Lorna Taylor; investigator Cisco Wojciechowski, Lorna's current husband; his father's old law partner, David "Legal" Siegel; and driver Earl Briggs, who's working off legal fees he owes Mickey. Val Valenzuela, bail bondsman and process server, shows up. Writer Connelly's other series protagonist, Harry Bosch, who happens to be Mickey's half brother, does a cameo appearance. Unlike Scott Turow, Connelly tells us next to nothing about these returning supporting characters. In fact, how well do we really know Mickey? Over the course of the series, he hasn't used his narration to psychoanalyze himself. When he does talk about his feelings here, mostly about his personal gods of guilt and the jury who judges the guilt of his clients, he's unnatural and pompous.

Mickey is better when he focuses on how our legal system works, grinding down everyone ensnared in it or part of it, and the backstory of secrets, corruption and double dealing behind the current case. He shines when he shares his knowledge of LA (his restaurant talk makes me feel like booking a flight as well as a table). Mickey dazzles when he's working the angles for a client, interviewing witnesses, plotting legal strategy and performing in the courtroom. The Gods of Guilt is Mickey's detailed report of how he created his defense for Andre La Cosse and how it played out in court. It's a legal procedural rather than a suspenseful legal thriller. If you're looking for unsavory clients, dueling lawyers and a pragmatic, crafty Mickey who dances his socks off before a jury, grab this one.

Review of Timothy Hallinan's Little Elvises

Little Elvises by Timothy Hallinan

Don't get me wrong. I'm an Elvis fan; a big fan, even though I'm not one of those people who make pilgrimages to Elvis's old stomping grounds at Graceland, or have an Elvis shrine in the bedroom. I love his movies (my fav is Jailhouse Rock), and there's nothing I enjoy more than crooning "Love Me Tender" or belting out "It's Now or Never" in the shower. So when I spied a book titled Little Elvises by one of my go-to authors, Timothy Hallinan, I was on it like a flea on a hound dog.

When the book begins, Los Angeles cop Paul DiGaudio is in an interrogation room stuffing his face with Halloween-size Tootsie Rolls, while he tells crook/narrator Junior Bender he knows Junior didn't commit the Hammer job. That job was a robbery in which the elderly Mrs. Hammer was pistol-whipped. Junior has an alibi and, besides, he's smart enough not to pack a weapon when he burgles, so he can avoid a robbery-under-special-circumstances charge. Junior's innocence doesn't matter to Paulie. Paulie is aware that Junior is a crimebuster for people "on the other side of the fence." (If you don't already know this, you can read Georgette Spelvin's review of the first Junior Bender book, Crashed, here.) Paulie's Uncle Vinnie is a suspect in the killing of Derek Bigelow, the kind of journalist who writes for The National Snoop, and Paulie is going to force Junior to help Vincent L. DiGaudio prove his innocence.

We've all noticed how American pop culture makes copies of anything original that makes money. Rina, Junior's 13-year-old daughter, wrote a school paper focusing on Philadelphia's Little Elvises, "who were churned to the surface in the wake of Elvis Presley." A few of them, such as Bobby Angel, could sing. None were as hard on the ears as Giorgio, yet he was so beautiful he was popular up until his disappearance in 1963. The man behind all the copycat singers with pompadours and tight pants who appeared on American Dance Hall and sold many records for a month was Paulie's Uncle Vinnie. This isn't good for Junior. The job Paulie wants him to do not only involves murder, it may involve the Mob.

Reading about crime is well and good, but when vivid writing makes laughs snort out of your nose, that's even better. It's one of the reasons I like Timothy Hallinan. Let's put Uncle Vinnie on the back burner while I show you Marge 'n' Ed's North Pole, a seedy motel at the north end of North Hollywood. Junior is divorced and he moves around a lot to thwart fellow criminals with a beef against him. This month's motel is a fantastic pick because no one would think Junior could sink so low. It's always Christmas at the North Pole and Junior is in Blitzen, where the cord to the blinkie-lights is glued to the outlet and "for good elves only" is engraved on the table. The carpet had been "a snowy white fifteen or twenty years ago, but was now the precise color of guilt, a brownish gray like a dusty spiderweb, interrupted here and there by horrific blotches of darkness, as though aliens with pitch in their veins had bled out on it."

There is no more 'n' Ed but there is a Marge, who has a cigarette screwed into a corner of her mouth and an economy-size jug of Old Igor's Private Stock vodka glued to one of her hands. She is smart enough to recognize that Junior, while not checking into the North Pole with a body in the trunk of his car, is not entirely law abiding. He's a mensch who might be able to find her daughter Doris. Marge hasn't heard from Doris in a few weeks, and what she saw when she stopped by the rented dump where Doris had been living with Mr. Pinkie Ring scared her.

Junior now has two detective job offers he can't refuse and he sets to work. Assisting him are his precocious daughter, Rina, Paulie and criminal pal Louie the Lost. They and the characters at the opposite end of the magnifying glass are so colorful they could stock a box of human Crayolas. For example, there's Popsie, the woman who answers Vinnie's door, with calves so muscled they look like "they'd evolved to hold the planet still while she walked." Vinnie's hair is dyed "a dead black that ate light without reflecting any" and he has a little soul patch that "clung uncertainly to his lower lip, like a misplaced comma." There's a neighbor who's "eighty, eighty-five, and so wrinkled it looked like he had enough skin for three people" and his hair is as "white as processed flour." There are people trying to stop Junior's investigation and a hired killer is so unusual and brilliantly drawn my stomach trembled. Somewhere in between Junior's friends, enemies and suspects is Bigelow's non-grieving widow Ronnie, who has lapis blue eyes and baby-fine blond hair twisted into a rope and held in place on top of her head by an inserted fork. She has a thing for bad men.

At its heart, Little Elvises isn't a purely comic novel, even though there are many funny touches and scenes that made me laugh. It's full of characters wounded by loss and bad luck. Musicians make music despite drug habits and poverty. Junior misses his daughter Rina and, during his investigation, he meets abandoned women who make him feel guilty about the divorce from his wife Kathy, whose current relationship with a hunter named Bill gives Junior little mental flare-ups of homicidal rage. At the same time, it's impossible to imagine Junior living the crime-free life that Kathy wants because he's not only good at being a crook, he gets off on it too.

I liked Hallinan's unusual protagonist, Junior. Being unconstrained by the law sure comes in handy for investigating crimes and dealing with criminals. I enjoyed Hallinan's riffs on the themes of love in its many guises, how the still waters of society and individuals run deep, the meaning of prejudice and the price of fame and survival. Hallinan obviously loves music and knows Los Angeles well enough to give us a criminal's-eye view of the city and its nearby desert. Sometimes I wondered if one of the two threads of Junior's investigations was about to get lost while he messed around, but that not only didn't happen, the suspense rose to a terrific finish. There are few better ways of spending a lazy evening than hanging out with resourceful Los Angeles burglar Junior Bender.

Note: Thanks to Read Me Deadly reader Bonnie Riley, who pointed out this book to me. I received an advance review copy of Little Elvises, published earlier this year by Soho Press.

Review of Michael Connelly's The Closers

The Closers by Michael Connelly

Like the prodigal son returning, he knew he was back in his place now. He was baptized again in the waters of the one true church. The church of the blue religion. And he knew that he would find his salvation in those who were long lost, that he would find it in these musty bibles where the dead lined up in columns and there were ghosts on every page.

Yep, Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch is back at the Los Angeles Police Department in Michael Connelly's 2005 book, The Closers. During his three years of retirement, Bosch found himself limping because his body was unbalanced without his holstered gun. Bosch doesn't return to the same old LAPD, however; a new chief is reforming the department after an FBI investigation found widespread corruption, violence, and civil rights violations within the LAPD ranks. He assigns Bosch to the Open-Unsolved Unit, where "the chorus of forgotten voices" of victims and their survivors sing.

Closer Goose Gossage is in baseball's Hall of Fame

Abel Pratt, who's in charge, calls his unit the most noble in the department and likens his officers to pitchers brought into a baseball game in the bottom of the ninth inning to win or lose the game––the closers. If they can't do it, nobody can. While Bosch and old partner, Kiz Rider, find new techniques and technology crucial, they'd get nowhere without the old-fashioned methods of interviewing witnesses, examining evidence, and following a good cop's instincts.

Author Connelly channels Hillary Waugh in this police procedural, in which a cold-hit match of DNA allows Bosch and Rider to re-open the 1988 murder investigation of 16-year-old Rebecca Verloren, who was taken from her Chatsworth bedroom several days before her dead body was found, off a trail on Oat Mountain, behind her family's home. Following the determined Bosch through Los Angeles reminded me of tagging along with Waugh's Homicide Lt. Frank Sessions as he goes about his day in Manhattan North. The attention to detail is remarkable; only the lint in the detectives' pockets goes unreported.

After a couple of series books that seemed phoned in, Connelly delivers a solid fifteenth that deals with the toll of violence over time. Rebecca's murder was "like a stone thrown into a lake," creating ripples that affected many lives. Her mother turns her slain daughter's room into a museum and can't bear the thought of moving; her father, a talented chef, can't tolerate staying. A plaque in her memory at Hillside Prep is worn smooth by all the touching. Rebecca's best friends can't forget her. The unsolved case cast a shadow over its original investigating officers, and it grips Rider and Bosch.

Bosch is a terrific fictional character, and this book features his picks in music, movies, and Los Angeles spots that Bosch fans have come to expect. The former Vietnam tunnel rat remains both the driven cop of the past––although some of his skills are a little rusty––and the solitary guy who hooks up with the occasional woman and longs for his young daughter, who is out of the country with her mother. As usual, Bosch runs up against a superior with a grudge and risks his badge––this time, in a cold case with "high jingo," meaning it involves departmental politics and possible corruption and cover-up. Back at the LAPD's Parker Center, he settles down at his desk across from Rider and opens the murder book with a sigh of relief. At the end of The Closers, Bosch resolves "to carry on the mission" and promises "always to speak for the dead." I'm glad he's back.