Book Report: A Darkness More Than Night

11. Michael Connelly, A Darkness More Than Night (2000) (5/2/23)

I've been slowly making my way through the next book in my alphabet project (I'm up to "I")—so slowly that I felt I needed a boost, and what better than a good mystery? I googled the Michael Connelly Bosch books, which I am also trying to read in order, then searched my shelves, and yes! I had the next one up, the seventh in the series. Or so I thought. Turns out, I skipped one. It had been part of the recent TV series, so the story was fresh in my mind, which made me think I'd read it. Oh well! 

This one brought together various characters from past non-Bosch Connelly books—FBI agent (now former) Terry McCaleb and Sheriff's Department detective Jaye Winston, from Blood Work, and tangentially the journalist protagonist of The Poet, Jack McEvoy. The story is a double one, involving the murder trial of a cocky Hollywood director, in which Bosch is the key witness for the prosecution, and a different recent murder, of a man suspected of yet another murder several years earlier but never caught, which Winston brings McCaleb in on for his professional opinion as a profiler. For a while, Bosch becomes the chief suspect in the second murder, because of evidence at the scene evoking the paintings of the darker-than-night 15th–16th-century Netherlandish artist Hieronymus Bosch. 

Too simplistic? Well, yeah. The reader of course knows it wasn't Bosch, that he was set up. I mean seriously, would he actually leave behind such blatant clues pointing at his own self? Though the outcome—successful: they get the new killer and the director both—does have a dark tinge that underscores the fraught nature of bringing justice in a slippery world of evil. 

Nuff said. It's a Harry Bosch mystery—nothing deep, but entertaining enough. And now, back to my "I" book. Maybe now that I'm on a reading roll, I can polish it off quickly.