What happens when the loose cannon who gets results for stupid chiefs is used by a stupid chief to get a result? Harry Bosch, fresh off helping his half-brother with a prosecution case, is called in to investigate a suicide as a personal favour, and avoid politicking. At the same time, he’s also investigating a more than twenty-year-old cold case which turns up the DNA of someone who couldn’t have been the murderer because they were only a child at the time.
A lot happened to Bosch in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and he’s reeling from all of it. He has so much fall out to deal with that it’s a surprise Connelly doesn’t describe him as glowing in the dark. Dual case wielding is a net positive in this instance because it keeps him busy, and the cold case is less prosaic than the suicide. Both give him a chance to let down and be let down by his fresh partner David Chu, first introduced in Nine Dragons, whose continued presence was predicated by the abrupt ending of that adventure. Moreso than Maddie, Chu is utilised here to expose Bosch’s harsh exterior and soft underbelly. It’s a strong dynamic.
The Drop does, admittedly, descend into serial killer bombast, but Bosch attracts that sort of thing. The tightrope between the extreme and the mundane — the suicide investigation is resolved by solid, if muddy, police work — is handled well, and even allows Bosch to pursue a new love interest, and one that’s not wholly inappropriate this time.
Yet the moral ambiguity of The Drop is slightly too ambiguous: it’s realistic that Bosch is an idealisation of what a police officer can achieve (albeit one who breaks way too many rules to trust in real life), but are we expected to believe that he would feel bad about preventing a murder, even of one of the foulest villains he’s ever encountered? And just how much of the cold case investigation was fed to him? Can Bosch trust Michael Connelly anymore? No, these books aren’t that meta.
If you’ve managed to read 24 Michael Connelly novels, 15 of which were pure Bosch (and a very good argument could be made that The Reversal was a Bosch novel), you know whether you like the man. If you like Bosch, The Drop is some good Bosch.
