Michael Connelly, Angels Flight: A Harry Bosch Novel (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1999). Hardcover | Paperback | Kindle

When a prominent African-American criminal defense attorney is murdered in downtown Los Angeles, Harry Bosch get assigned the case. Unfortunately, the primary suspects are elite detectives in the city’s Robbery Homicide Division. The case is a political loser. If he arrests a cop, he loses the respect of his fellow officers. If he doesn’t arrest a cop, the city will erupt in a riot.

Oh, and Bosch’s year-old marriage is falling apart.

Angels Flight is Michael Connelly’s sixth Harry Bosch novels, and like the previous ones, I couldn’t put it down. Connelly writes a tight, well-paced whodunit. The twists and turns of the investigation keep your eyes glued to the page even as your empathy for the investigator grows because of his personal crisis. You want Bosch to solve the crime and save his marriage. But can he really do both?

Connelly has his pulse on the post-Rodney King antipathy between Los Angeles’ black residents and the LAPD. This lends verisimilitude to the novel’s portrait of rogue police officers, race hustlers, and bureaucratic fixers. In the end, everyone gets what they want, though not in the way they expected. Angels Flight is a great read, probably the best of the first six installments in Connelly’s twenty-novel Bosch series.

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