THE HOLLOW’s Pursuit: Connelly’s latest is rich story of crime and punishment…
After the early loss of his mother, the adolescent Harry Bosch spent a lot of time in care, moving between foster homes and the ominous buildings at the MacLaren Children’s Center. He rarely found solace and had a limited amount of friends. One of those few, Charles Lamb or ‘Chops’, was killed at the Center while Bosch was away at a foster home and that death has never been fully explained.
Decades later and many of the horrors of that institution have been exposed and as the building prepares to be demolished, legal cases have meant reparations for those affected. When Mickey Haller brings a portion of that settlement to Harry, it reminds him of those unanswered questions.
Already in the midst of helping Renee Ballard break an alleged murderer’s alibi, Harry starts to take time to actively investigate Chops’ death. But he has no idea that his renewed interest is going to place him in the crosshairs of a much larger and dangerous investigation.
What started as a legacy search for consequence rapidly becomes a race against time…
In recent years, I’ve enjoyed the fact that Michael Connelly has continued to expand his universe of characters and have them crossover in wholly logical and understandable ways. But I’ll be honest and say that while I like Renee Ballard and the new energy she’s brought to cold case investigations, the appearance of Harry Bosch in her stories (even if billed as a team-up of sorts on the cover) has often left the retired but hardly retiring detective as more of a cameoing supporting player.
So, it’s good that one of The Hollow‘s many qualities is returning Harry to centre-stage. There’s a couple of appearances from Mickey Haller and a solid B-story/case in which Ballard features, but this is very much personal territory for Harry. Long-term readers know Bosch’s timeline and over the years the books have filled in important milestones. We know his mother was murdered when he was a child, that he grew up in troubled foster care and eventually served in Vietnam (the tv series moved this up to Afghanistan) before joining the police. But that time in care, though alluded to, has rarely been explored in any great detail and The Hollow seeks to shine a flashlight on that period… in particular one event that ultimately leads to a more modern crime with far-reaching consequences.
Connelly has been a best-selling author for decades and is now a dab hand at this, of course, but The Hollow really does make a good job of showing cause and effect, even if those factors aren’t always revealed in that order. A river runs through it – specifically the Los Angeles River – and we get to see how Harry reacts to things as an adolescent and now as a man, covering some of the same physical territory, now in his 70s. Both versions of Bosch have a code of right and wrong and a prickly aversion to misplaced authority, especially when that power is abused and it’s possible to see them being the same person, even as those things evolve and inform through experiences.
But it’s also interesting to note that while it is clearly a reward for existing readers, The Hollow is also accessible as a standalone procedural and manages to mix the very personal and the more explosive together in a way that would also work well on the screen. That’s no mean achievement and is a tribute to Connelly’s style and attention to detail – with this latest tome the best of recent releases (ones that had already set a high benchmark).
It’s also interesting to note that while it is clearly a reward for existing readers, The Hollow is also accessible as a standalone procedural and manages to mix the very personal and the more explosive together… This is Bosch at his best and Connelly at his crime-writing peak…
As Connelly notes in an afterword, the MacLaren Children’s Center was an all-too-real place with as bad a reputation as the book suggests, recently torn down to be replaced by a park in a perhaps well-intentioned effort to turf over its history. The legal settlement and battle for restitution are always real. The charity to which Harry considers donating, Hope in a Suitcase, is genuine. Equally, the Wonderland Murders (to which Harry eventually finds a connection) is a genuine notorious incident, one that is still shrouded in controversy and unsolved elements. The fact that some of the fiction of the book is based on such facts, is enough to keep you up at night… much as it does Bosch in the pages of the novel. That mix of reality and fiction solidifies the book’s credentials.
This is the second Connelly book of the year (the first being Ironwood, with Connelly’s newest character, Detective Sergeant Stilwell). On the tv front, there’s the just-finished-filming production of Bosch: Start of Watch series which explores Harry’s early days as a police-officer in the early 1990s, a second season of Ballard (with Maggie Q) on Amazon Prime and a final run for The Lincoln Lawyer on Netflix. It’s a shame that with Bosch/Bosch: Legacy now done, we’re unlikely to see The Hollow adapted for the screen, but I’ll always find time for Bosch’s adventures in print (and, maybe, down the road – as Harry ages in real time – books centred around his daughter Maddie?).
This is Bosch at his best and Connelly at his crime-writing peak. Highly recommended.
9/10
The Hollow is released by Little, Brown and Company on 27th October (US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) and by Orion on 5th November (UK and Ireland).