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Hardcover: US: Hard-boiled cop, Hong Kong triads collide

By Laurie Muchnick
BLOOMBERG
Sunday, Nov 01, 2009, Page 14

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Harry Bosch is a tunnel rat. He spent his army years exploring the dangerous maze beneath the Vietnam jungle. When he got out, he burrowed into Los Angeles, learning every inch of the city as a police detective.

Now, in Nine Dragons, the 15th hard-boiled Bosch novel, Michael Connelly sends his hero halfway around the world, to Hong Kong, and doesn’t give him any time to dig below the surface while he tries to save the only person in the world he loves.

It’s nerve-wracking — in a good way — to see Bosch out of his element. He makes seemingly small mistakes that lead to life-changing consequences. That would never happen in LA.

It starts, of course, with a murder in the City of Angels. A Chinese liquor store owner is killed, and his death may be connected to the triads, Chinese organized-crime groups. Bosch is on unfamiliar turf in his hometown, before he even boards a plane for the Far East. He’s forced to collaborate with Detective Chu from the Asian Gang Unit, who will translate both language and culture for him.

Like his predecessor Philip Marlowe, Bosch is a loner, both personally and professionally. It isn’t easy to earn his trust, and Chu hasn’t done it.

Harry arrests a triad member, and soon gets a threatening phone call telling him to back off. Then he receives a video e-mail showing his 13-year-old daughter, Maddie, who lives with his ex-wife in Hong Kong, strapped to a chair in a nondescript room.

(Compare this to the first Bosch novel, The Black Echo, in which the cops were constantly using payphones to check in with the office. That was 1992, but it feels like the Middle Ages.)

How did the triads in Hong Kong react to an arrest in Los Angeles so quickly? Could Detective Chu, or someone else in the Asian Gang Unit, have tipped them off? Bosch isn’t taking any chances with his daughter’s life, so he hops on a plane for a day that turns out, with the time difference, to last 39 hours.

There’s plenty of awesome detective work here; maybe too awesome. Zip: Watch Bosch pinpoint the one building in all of Hong Kong where that video was made. Zip zip: Watch him find Maddie’s discarded mobile phone. Despite Bosch’s blunders, everything moves along remarkably quickly.

Connelly has succumbed to the publishing-industry imperative that best-selling writers must crank out not just one book a year, but two or even three. Five months ago, he produced The Scarecrow, about former Los Angeles Times reporter Jack McEvoy.

While there’s pleasure to be had in Nine Dragons, it has less depth and complexity than Connelly’s earlier books. I’m sure I speak for many fans when I say I’d rather read one terrific Connelly novel a year than two pretty good ones.

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