Reader Reviews for The Narrows (Harry Bosch):
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Narrow on interest
Comment: Oh dear. The first Michael Connelly book that I seriously thought about chucking out of the window. Well, after a string of 5 star books it had to happen and this is, for me so far, Connelly's direst effort.
A few things wrong with the labels attached to the book - mystery: there is no mystery as you know who the killer is right off, in fact on my copy the front cover said "The Poet is back" so you know before page 1. So no mystery at all. Thriller: it most certainly isn't that.
For the first 100 pages Bosch potters about his dead colleague's boat reading files. Rachel Walling is in the book and she potters about the desert looking at corpses. By page 200 they've met up and are pottering around the desert together and then back to the boat. The first interesting thing happens around page 300 which is then over by page 315. Then it's a weary final slog to the page 400 mark and the end of the book.
You see Michael Connelly left the ending of "The Poet" open with the killer alive and many fans thought this wasn't a real resolution. Also Harry Bosch retired and the Private Investigator angle isn't working for Connelly so this book serves to resolve these two things: 1) Kill the Poet and, 2) Get Bosch back into the LAPD. The other 380 pages in this 400 page book are just filler.
Because The Poet killer makes fleeting appearances, Bosch and Walling are basically just retracing his steps for most of the book and gathering evidence. There's no interaction until the final pages. A lot of the time is spent inside Bosch's mind and having read this book, I have to say Bosch ain't the most interesting detective ever created. His mundane thoughts about mortality, his daughter, Las Vegas, and the state of the FBI are really just that, dull and dreary. I couldn't care less what Bosch thinks about whether Vegas is too seedy, I read Connelly because his stories have drive and are brilliant reads.
So yeah this and "The Poet" are the two worst books Connelly has written but thankfully the Poet is as dead at the end as this rubbish "saga". Hopefully now he can get back to coming up with interesting cases for Bosch to investigate rather than give him too much time to wander about and ponder the boring state of things at his end. This book hasn't put me off reading any more books by this guy but I will say to readers looking for the brilliance usually present in a Michael Connelly novel to stay away from this one. Very easy to put down and ignore.
Customer Rating:
Summary: "Everybody counts or nobody counts."
Comment: Connelly has developed this odd habit of killing off characters from his earlier books, even the major ones. In this case, it's Terry McCaleb, retired FBI profiler and heart transplant survivor, protagonist of _Blood Work_, who has died suddenly on his charter fishing boat, a victim of his new heart following the path of the old one. (Clint Eastwood went to the funeral.) Only his wife isn't at all sure that's what really happened, so she calls up retired LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, a friend of Terry's. (Like any successful detective, Bosch knows almost everyone in L.A. worth knowing.) Meanwhile, out in the Nevada desert, the FBI has begun excavating a body-dump site which they discover is the work of "The Poet" -- disappeared Special Agent Robert Backus, serial killer extraordinaire from the 1996 novel of the same name. (Connelly had always said he was never going to write a sequel to that one, but here it is.) And Backus has made sure the Bureau has had to bring in Agent Rachel Walling on the case from her bureaucratic exile in South Dakota (a recent promotion from North Dakota). Of course, Bosch being the sort of person he is, and Walling being the sort of person she is, it doesn't take long for their paths to cross and their independent investigations to merge -- or at least to politely hold hands. And as they follow the clues across the desert from L.A. to Vegas to a cut-rate Nevada brothel village, where's Backus? Look over your shoulders, people. It's a pretty good plot line with the characters and the style Connelly's fans have come to expect. And this time Harry also spending time in a flea-bitten Las Vegas residential motel (he doesn't want to allow himself to become too comfortable there) so he can be in his five-year-old daughter's life. (Eleanor Wish, the kid's mother and Harry's ex, is a successful professional gambler and she's not leaving Vegas.) And at the end of it all, Bosch decides he's going back to the LAPD to work on the cold case squad; he just can't deal with the lack of a badge any longer. By the way, Jack McEvoy, the reporter from The Poet, doesn't turn up this time, but Cassidy Black from Void Moon does, in an uncredited bit part on the neighboring balcony.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Scary, suspenseful ride
Comment: Connelly's hero, Harry Bosch, returns in this book that's a sequel to his 1996 novel "The Poet." Bosch is working for Terry McCaleb's widow, Graciela, who believes that Terry's death was a homicide and his investigating leads him to FBI agent Rachel Walling, who's tracking a serial killer called The Poet, so nicknamed because he leaves lines of poetry with his victims. The action goes from the California coast to Las Vegas to the desert and the suspense never lets up. The book alternates between first person narrative (as told by Bosch) and third person narrative (which mainly deals with the FBI and Walling). Connelly has created quite an anomaly of a villain: Robert Backus, a former FBI agent turned serial killer, who knows the investigative rules and procedures as well as the people tracking him. I have only read a handful of Connelly's Bosch series, but this is one of the best.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Poet is back
Comment: In a previous novel, a decomposed body was found but not positively identified. Clues pointed to the Poet, a serial killer who was targeting police officers. Now he has reappeared. Harry Bosch, who has retired from LAPD to become a PI, becomes involved. FBI agent Rachel Walling is back. Other characters from previous novels appear.
There are the usual conflicts, shootouts, etc. Some parts can get a bit gruesome dealing with decayed bodies. You will get a little insight into Nevada's legal brothels (there is a Web page directory - you can Google almost anything) - it is a county option, and it does seem to provide most of the income in some small towns.
There are references to the motion picture starring Clint Eastwood (a little reality blended in). Along the way, Harry Bosch is faced with a choice - should he restart his career in LA, or spend time in Las Vegas where his young daughter is located?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Would Make a Great Movie
Comment: What a movie this book would make. Terry McCalb, played by Clint Eastwood in the excellent movie, "Blood Work" is now dead and his widow hires Harry Bosch to investigate, as she believes the pills Terry had been taking for his heart transplant may have been tampered with. She thinks Terry has been murdered. Lots of tension in this story as Bosch must confront one of the most dastardly villains to ever haunt the pages of fiction, the Poet. If this book should make it to the screen, I'd like to see Dustin Hoffman as Bosch, Jodi Foster as FBI agent Rachel Walling and Bob Dylan as the Poet, even though he may be a little old for the part, he'd be superb and plenty scary to boot.
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