Harry Bosch – A Very Cool Dude

I just finished reading the latest Michael Connelly book, The Drop, where he returns to his hero Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch.  He’s one of my favorite characters, right up there with Jack Reacher and Lucas Davenport.  Bosch is a deeply flawed but totally admirable homicide detective in L.A.  He lives by a code where everyone counts or nobody counts.  He doesn’t always take the easy, politically correct way but is devoted to the truth.  That takes a very subtle kind of courage.  In this latest book, working out of the cold case unit, he is confronted by an old politically connected adversary who asks him to investigate the death of his son.  In addition, Harry is tracking down a serial killer from one of the cold cases.  Harry is faced with conflicting emotions as he deals with redefining some of his oldest personal relationships on his job, a screwed up partner, a potential love interest, and on top of all that playing single dad to a teenage daughter.  I did say admirable, right?  Harry is a lot of fun to follow around.  I can also understand why Hollywood has found it tough to make the Bosch series into a movie, such as they did (very well) with Connelly’s other main character Mickey Haller (Bosch’s secret half brother) in The Lincoln Lawyer.  It would be very difficult to understand Bosch’s complexities in the short time span cinema allows.   I finished this book in three days, reading whenever I had a free moment.  That’s what I do when I’m reading something I really like or a book, such as this one, in a series with a great hero/heroine.  My mother used to accuse me of “raping” books because I read them so fast.  The truth is that I enjoy the experience of reading so much that I find myself transported into the world of the book.  There are times when I actually can’t sleep because of where I left off reading.  I’ll sneak downstairs and read until I get to a point that will allow me to rest.  Whenever I’m asked about raising children I always say one of the most important things you should try to impart to them is a love of reading.  My basement is literally over run with thousands of old books that I haven’t been able to part with yet.  Whenever we packed up to move in the military there was always dozens of boxes devoted to just books.  That problem was alleviated earlier this year when my wife bought me a Kindle – which I enjoy immensely.  I still have to figure out what I’m going to do with all those books.  I feel I should pass them on so someone else could glean the same amount of pleasure that I did reading them but I may have run out of time in this new electronic reading age.