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A review by lesserjoke
Angels Flight by Michael Connelly
4.0
This 1999 novel is interestingly (and depressingly) timely two decades on, as it plays out against a backdrop of police brutality and an ensuing race riot. Author Michael Connelly may have been drawing on the recent high-profile Rodney King and OJ Simpson cases, but his lurid tale of a murdered attorney who had been suing the city on behalf of a black man tortured by cops interrogating him about a missing white girl almost feels like it could have pulled from today's headlines instead. The characters voice a lot of arguments that sound familiar as well, and it's to the writer's credit that protagonist detective Harry Bosch is both more enlightened than his average peers and willing to listen to the African American colleagues who challenge his biased perspective further. That's a step up from his attitude in the last book, and while the series may be 'copaganda' overall, at least in volumes like this it's not afraid to call out the problems in law enforcement that systemically enable and protect abusers.
The procedural element is fairly straightforward, but that conventional plot still throws a decent number of red herrings at us to disguise the ultimate solution to the lawyer's death. The main flavor of the text, though, is in the fraught atmosphere of a people fed up with racist misconduct and poised on the verge of boiling over as the department investigates and potentially exonerates its own officers. And that's why this works so well as a Bosch story, with the investigator continuing to come into focus as a man determined to find justice for every victim who crosses his path, no matter the political fallout. It won't win him career advancement from the higher-ups looking to sweep everything under the rug, but he's the ideal agent to uncover the truth of a crime at any cost.
[Content warning for child sex abuse, gun violence, homophobia, and racism including slurs.]
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The procedural element is fairly straightforward, but that conventional plot still throws a decent number of red herrings at us to disguise the ultimate solution to the lawyer's death. The main flavor of the text, though, is in the fraught atmosphere of a people fed up with racist misconduct and poised on the verge of boiling over as the department investigates and potentially exonerates its own officers. And that's why this works so well as a Bosch story, with the investigator continuing to come into focus as a man determined to find justice for every victim who crosses his path, no matter the political fallout. It won't win him career advancement from the higher-ups looking to sweep everything under the rug, but he's the ideal agent to uncover the truth of a crime at any cost.
[Content warning for child sex abuse, gun violence, homophobia, and racism including slurs.]
Find me on Patreon | Goodreads | Blog | Twitter