Echo Park

Echo Park

Michael Connelly is the bestselling selling author of Lincoln Park, and The Closers.

Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing — a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.

 After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat.  In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.

After three years on the crime beat in L.A., Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published in 1992 and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America. 

Taken from the official web site of bestselling author Michael Connelly.

Now for my review For “Echo Park,”

 A Police Crime Story

I was fortune enough to meet Michael Connelly at the Florida Mystery Mingle in Sarasota Florida, March of 2008. Michael Connelly is quiet but his writing is not. This was the first book of his that I have read and what a find. His style is fast and grabs you with his detective Harry Bosch. Echo Park is just the type of story I like to read, and with no extra words he moves the novel forward effortlessly making it one of the better police crime books I've read in awhile. Every chapter seems perfect as the story unfolds. 

Harry Bosch works the open unsolved cases and one of them surfaces again when the DA calls informing Bosch that he missed a clue back in 1993 that could have solved the disappearance of Marie Gesto and sent the suspect to jail.

Required to take the suspects confession, Bosch is part of a team escorting the killer into the woods to identify the victims remains when he escapes and Harry Bosch is left to find him.

I loved this book, it embraces all the levels required to deliver a terrific police crime story.