Lisa reads: 9 Dragons by Michael Connelly
9 Dragons by Michael Connelly is the latest installment in a series of novels focusing on Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch of the LAPD. There’s a shooting that may involve a Hong Kong triad, a reluctant partner, a detective from the Asian Gang Unit that Harry’s not sure he can trust. That’s just a typical day for a fictional detective, until the case strikes close to home: Harry’s teenage daughter, Maddie, goes missing and he receives a video from her kidnappers. She is clearly in danger and there’s every indication that it is tied to the Triad shooting. Harry is on the next plane to Hong Kong and he intends to bring his daughter back, no matter what.
I am a big fan of detective novels, and I love a good series — you get a chance to get to know the characters, to see them succeed (or fail) and to see what happens in their lives. Harry Bosch is a great example. We’ve seen him through various ups and downs during his time with the LAPD (IAD investigations, transfers from Robbery Homicide to the cold case squad and back again) and turmoil in his personal life, including having his home destroyed in an earthquake. We saw him briefly married to Eleanor Wish, a former FBI agent who is now a professional poker player in Hong Kong; their daughter — a daughter Harry never knew he had — lives with her mother overseas.
The story starts with a shooting in a liquor store; not an uncommon occurrence in LA. The victim is an elderly Chinese man, someone Bosch met many years ago, and he feels a strong connection to the case. He’s a little out of his element — he doesn’t speak the language or understand the family’s customs. Consulting with the Asian Gang Unit leads to suspicions that a Triad may be involved — the victim appears to be paying off a customer with a suspicious tattoo on a surveillance tape.
Because Chu is unable to get a quick translation of the Chinese tattoos on the victim (which makes Bosch suspiscious), Bosch sends pictures of them to his daughter in Hong Kong. Maddie is able to make the translation and although Bosch cautions her to keep quiet about it, well, she’s a teenaged girl with pictures of a real-life murder victim on her cell phone! She is bound to tell somebody. A few hours later, Bosch has a video message showing his daughter, tied to a chair, the victim of a kidnapping.
Hong Kong is a very different world from Los Angeles, but Bosch is determined to protect his daughter. His ex-wife, Eleanor, and her colleague, Sun Yee, are able to provide some help, but Harry is running on instinct. He needs to find his little girl before she disappears into an Asian underworld of triads and human traffickers.
The story moves at a whirlwind pace and sweeps you right along with it. The characters are real and honest — there are no saints in this story and they will get a chance to try and atone for their sins. There are mistakes and mis-steps along with flashes of brilliant investigating. It’s a terrific addition to a terrific series.
My copy of 9 Dragons was provided free of charge through LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
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Lisa,
I’m curious about whether you view Connelly as at the top of his game with the latest work.
I’ve read a zillion Lawrence Block novels, featuring the private eye Matthew Scudder. A few were really good, but after a while, I had a hard time judging the quality. If the books were good enough, I enjoyed them, because I was enthralled with the character by then. Scudder was like a comfortable oldie song or something.
So after a while, it didn’t matter how good they were, they just had to be good enough, and that fact evoked the best of Block’s writing on Scudder.
Is Connelly still able to be fresh. Or is he riding off the previous work on Harry Bausch … not that there is anything necessarily wrong with that.
Actually, I think this is a bit better than the last couple I read. I think when you’re following a series, you have to expect that things will be a bit up and down. I’m also a big fan of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, as well as having all of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels on my bookshelf, so I know a bit about that. I remember hearing John Sanford (the Prey series) talk about the difficulties of writing a series at a book signing a few years ago – you need to balance introducing the characters to new readers without boring the regular audience, keeping your backstories straight, finding new things to focus on. It has to be very difficult, and some are just not going to be as good.
And I think it does get harder to judge the overall quality of the books; I think you start to judge it strictly within its own universe. If Spenser and Hawke, or Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, seem to be hitting all the right notes and it doesn’t immediately remind me of a previous case, it’s all good.
In this case, I think 9 Dragons is smart to focus on something a bit outside of the case – Harry’s relationship with his daughter and his complicated feelings about his ex-wife. The real test will be if I feel like the things I learned about Harry in this book carry over into the next one.
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