Pun Salad

I have slightly under 150 books in my To Be Read pile, and a small Perl script to pick the next one to be read. It's been giving me a lot of Michael Connelly lately; this is the fourth one since July. I'm not superstitious, but maybe it's trying to tell me something.

Lost Light is in Connelly's Harry Bosch series. In this one, Harry has resigned from the LAPD, and his pension gives him more than enough money to do what he wants. But Harry doesn't want to go normal retiree things; he's driven to seek justice for homicide victims whose cases have languished.

He takes up the very cold case of Angella Benton, a movie studio underling brutally murdered years ago. The murder was apparently related to the theft of $2 million from a movie set a few days later, at which point the case was taken from Harry and assigned to a different division, something that's grated on him. Surprisingly, although there's been no action on the case, Harry is nearly immediately warned off by an ex-partner. And he discovers a possible link to female FBI agent who went missing months later.

Soon enough, Harry's back in the familiar world of lowlifes, both inside and outside law enforcement agencies. And (also as usual), he's obsessed, dogged, and extremely competent even when mired in a hopelessly complex plot.

In an unusual move, Connelly switched from his usual third-person narrative to first-person in this book. Also, in a nice touch, the World's Greatest Detective has a small cameo: he and Harry wave to each other on page 237. (If Harry and the WGD ever joined forces, criminal activity in southern California would be wiped out. But what would they do with the rest of their week?)