While he has spent most
of the last year suing the LAPD over his forced retirement, these days Harry
Bosch is a private detective when he isn’t working as a reserve officer for the
San Fernando PD. Bosch works for free as the small department does not have the
funds to pay him. For Bosch it is a chance to wear the badge and work any of
the city’s many unsolved cases. One of the cases Bosch is working on is the
serial rapist case as the “Screen Cutter.” That case is the prominent secondary
storyline of The Wrong Side Of Goodbye.
Bosch got the job at
SFPD because of his old LAPD contacts. He gets his private detective jobs by
way of referrals. Sometimes those referrals happen by the way of his former colleagues.
While he might be an enemy of some in LAPD who are angry over the lawsuit there
are plenty of others folks very aware that nobody is a better detective then
Bosch on a case.
That ability and
those contacts lead him to a meeting with the 85-year-old reclusive billionaire
Whitney Vance. Creator and owner of Advance Engineering, Whitney Vance expanded
the family legacy considerably from a modest start dating back during the California
gold rush. Whitney also believes he may have expanded the family legacy another
way-- by fathering a child.
While in film school
at USC in 1949, he met someone. Hispanic and underage, she was not somebody
that the family would appreciate. They had a brief relationship and she became
pregnant. After Whitney told his father, who was convinced that the young woman
was looking to become a married citizen, certain people talked to her about not
having the child. She then vanished and Whitney has no idea what happened to
her or the baby.
Whitney’s independence
was now over as his father had leverage on him to make him conform. She was
under age so there was that potential legal issue as well as the family
embarrassment if the story cane out and was public. He did as he was told and
left film school and transferred to Cal Tech. Eventually graduating and further
expanding the family legacy.
All these years later,
he can tell Bosch little at this point other than her name, Vibiana Duarte, and
that she used to work at the student cafeteria known as “Everybody’s Kitchen.”
Those facts and a couple of others give Bosch enough to go on. That hunt for
the heir becomes the prominent storyline of The Wrong Side Of Goodbye.
This latest book in
the Bosch series is far more straightforward than earlier books in the series.
Bosch divides his time between both cases, with occasional side excursions to
see or call his daughter, as the pages fly by. There is zero character development
for anyone in the novel as Bosch and his family were fleshed out long ago. Even
characters new to readers are barely more than cardboard cutouts and interchangeable
as spare parts. Instead, it is about the hunt for a rapist and the heir.
It wouldn’t be a
Bosch novel without a bit of workplace friction. That function is served here
by having Bosch work in the San Fernando PD under a boss that has a bit of a bureaucratic
bent. It isn’t surprising that Bosch flaunts a rule that he sees as petty only
to have it become an issue for another character. The reader that pays
attention to detail will see the setup for this coming a mile away.
Overall, the latest
Bosch novel is a good one. Though it lacks the complexity of some of the earlier
novels and a couple of the twists are a bit obvious, The Wrong Side Of Goodbye is
a good read. The only real problem is that this read is nowhere near the high
bar this author consistently set for most of this very entertaining series. Good
on its own, The Wrong Side Of Goodbye, does not come close to the books
earlier in the series.
The Wrong Side Of Goodbye: A Bosch
Novel
Michael Connelly
Little, Brown And Company (Hachette
Book Group)
November 2016
ISBN# 978-0-316-39675-2
LARGE PRINT Hardback (also available in
hardcover, eBook, paperback and audio)
555 Pages
$31.00
Material supplied by
the good folks of the Plano Public Library System.
Kevin R. Tipple ©2017
Posts
3 comments:
I'm reading this now. It was a $2.99 Book Bub over the holidays. So far I'm really enjoying it. I love Connelly. My favorite book is The Poet.
I was maybe 30 pages from the end or so when BookBub did that ad deal. I am a big time fan of his. Not sure what my favorite book of his would be.
I used my handy library to get a copy of this one and enjoyed the read. I found it typical Bosch and liked seeing some of his "growth" on the technology end of things, thanks, I'm sure, to his daughter. A former Angelino, I always like following Bosch through the state, although I'm not sure all the roadmap passages would interest someone not familiar with the area.
The first Connelly I read was The Poet, and it hooked me on the rest of his books, so that might have to be a favorite of mine.
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