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lotuscandy (United Kingdom) (2009/08/07):
*from Kirkus Reviews*
The 2nd tense, tightly wound tangle of a case for Hieronymous Bosch (The Black Echo, 1991). This time out, the LAPD homicide cop, who's been exiled to Hollywood Division for his bumptious behavior, sniffs out the bloody trail of the designer drug ``black ice.'' Connelly (who covers crime for the Los Angeles Times) again flexes his knowledge of cop ways - and of cop-novel cliches. Cast from the hoary mold of the maverick cop, Bosch pushes his way onto the story's core case - the apparent suicide of a narc - despite warnings by top brass to lay off. Meanwhile, Bosch's boss, a prototypical pencil pusher hoping to close out a majority of Hollywood's murder cases by New Year's Day, (only a week hence) assigns Bosch a pile of open cases belonging to a useless drunk, Lou Porter. One of the cases, the slaying of an unidentified Hispanic, seems to tie in to the death of the narc, which Bosch begins to read as murder stemming from the narc's dirty involvement in black ice. When Porter is murdered shortly after Bosch speaks to him, and then the detective's love affair with an ambitious pathologist crashes, Bosch decides to head for Mexico, where clues to all three murders point. There, the well-oiled, ten- gear narrative really picks up speed.
Ed Hahn (USA: MT) (2009/11/12):
I don't know how I missed this one. It's a real winner: Michael Connelly at his best.This story involves a supposed suicide of an LAPD narc, Calexico Moore, that Harry Bosch pursues based on a hunch that it wasn't a suicide at all. Making his superior officers very nervous as usual, Harry, in the process of trying to close a couple homicides at the end of the year, keeps running into connections to the original murder. The story evolves from there. The descriptions of the bullfights and a laboratory raid are exceptionally well done. Harry's introspection, internal narrative and empathy with Moore are also well written. The Black Ice is a terse, suspenseful, exciting story.
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