Book Report: Trunk Music

40. Michael Connelly, Trunk Music (1997) (8/14/21)

We have taken to binge-watching TV series, usually one or two episodes a night until the whole shebang is over. Currently, we are barging through the seven-season Bosch on Netflix, based on Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch. I like the series, though I'm not crazy about the lead, Titus Welliver, who is a little too reptilian. Season 2 was based in part on the fifth Bosch book, which happens to be where I am at as I work my way through the series. It is also based in part on The Last Coyote, which was the fourth book (reviewed here). In both cases, the TV rendition ventures very, very far from the literary inspiration. As in, the perpetrator in both of the mysteries Bosch investigates is someone quite other than in the books.

But I'm not here to critique that. I found the television version, mixing and matching storylines, quite acceptable—appropriately complex for a ten-episode series. And Connelly, as executive producer, must have thought the variations on his imaginings, developed and sometimes written by Eric Overmyer, were... an improvement? Or maybe he just liked all that Hollywood money and simply went along with the reworking, who knows?

The book Trunk Music is tightly focused on the instigating crime—a money launderer found shot dead in the trunk of his Bentley off Mulholland Drive, overlooking the Hollywood Bowl (the term "trunk music" refers to a mafia hit)—and Bosch's investigation, which ends up taking him to Las Vegas and getting him mixed up with the mob, the FBI, and his great true love, Eleanor Wish, whom he met in the first book in the series, The Black Echo, and whom he's not laid eyes on for the last five years, since that book ended with her being convicted of a felony and sent to prison. But she's out now, and their romance can flower, like a cactus blossom! 

That's another difference with the series, where Eleanor is introduced as a successful professional poker player, married to a Chinese man and the mother of a sixteen-year-old—not to mention a former FBI agent and Harry's ex-wife (the teenager is his daughter, Maddie). It took some finessing to portmanteau thirteen books covering sixteen years into a few years of a very eventful LAPD career. 

I like the simplicity of a single mystery, with a major red herring taking up the first half of the book as planted evidence takes Bosch and his partners down the wrong path—but then they start to put two and two together in a different way. And voilà. One of the bad guys in the TV series ends up playing a very minor role in the book, while the bad guy in the book plays a similarly unprepossessing role in the TV adaptation. 

And I know this will make little sense to anyone reading this—and no doubt will make little sense to me when I revisit it in a year—but I don't want to give anything away! The point is, another book done. Only 26 to go in my reading challenge. I need to get cracking.