The Overlook by Michael Connelly
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Bosch nodded but kept silent. As they waited his thoughts carried him down the streets and up the hills to the overlook, where the last thing Stanley Kent ever saw was the city spread before him in beautiful shimmering lights. Maybe to Stanley it looked like heaven was waiting for him at the end."

I remember that almost a quarter of a century ago I liked Bosch novels by Michael Connelly a lot - but these were the earliest novels in the series. I haven't read anything by the author for quite a long time so I reached for The Overlook, one of the newer Bosch novels (2006). Well, sad to say, I feel quite different about this installment. I find it completely unremarkable. Were it the first novel in the series, most likely I would not read another one. Maybe I am getting too picky and grumpy in old age. Maybe.

This is Hieronymus Bosch's first case after his transfer to Homicide Special. A body of a man, shot execution style, is found at an overlook above Mulholland Dam. Bosch quickly ascertains that the victim was a physician. But when on the scene of the crime he meets Rachel Walling, with whom he had been romantically involved in the past and who is a member of a special unit of FBI, it becomes clear that the case may be related to homeland security. It turns out that the victim was not an ordinary doctor but a medical physicist who had direct access to radioactive materials.

The investigation proceeds almost as a competition between Los Angeles Homicide Special and FBI. The sides keep secrets from each other, but the shades of intimacy that still exist between Bosch and Walling are a convenient device for the author to let the reader know more than any of the sides does.

I find the plot only moderately interesting and the thread that involves Bosch's new partner, who belongs to a different generation, feels superficial and tokenish. Similarly, the Vietnam flashback to Bosch's service as a "tunnel rat" as well as the long passage about an operation commanded by an idiot police captain are incongruous with the plot. The former is too serious and the latter, probably designed as a comedic touch, is too cliché to be funny.

Readers who love plot twists (I don't) will be happy to find them in the denouement. But the whole novel feels so thoroughly unimpressive that I suspect Mr. Connelly wrote it in a hurry when he needed fast cash or maybe it was written to fulfill a contractual obligation with the publisher. Yes, the book is readable and moderately interesting; it provides a harmless way of spending few hours, but one could likely spend the time better. I will look for older Bosch novels to check whether I like them as much as I used to.

Two-and-a-quarter stars.



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