THE BLACK ECHO - Book review

I’ve read a good number of debut novels in my time, and Michael Connelly’s The Black Echo is one of the best. Here can be found assured writing, believable characters, vivid description, good pacing, and a likeable and tough protagonist. Harry is short for Hieronymus; apparently his mother ‘had a thing about fourteenth century painters’ (p97). 

LAPD Detective Harry Bosch is called out to the body of a vagrant suspected of succumbing to a drug overdose; stuffed in a concrete pipe near Mullholland Dam. But he reckons it doesn’t look like a suicide. And he recognises the corpse – a fellow soldier from Vietnam twenty years ago, Billy Meadows. Bosch immediately thinks something is very wrong here: ‘There are no coincidences’ (p25).

On checking out the dead man’s apartment, Bosch discovers that the place had been searched already, though an attempt had been made to hide the fact. The search had not discovered a pawn ticket, which Bosch decides to check out at the named shop.

But the shop has been broken into, jewellery and other items stolen…

His leads takes him to the Westland Bank break-in of the previous year. The felons had tunnelled in and raided the safety deposit boxes, the haul estimated at $2m. This robbery was investigated by the FBI but no arrests were made.

Bosch is told to work with the FBI on his latest murder case, and his partner is FBI agent Eleanor Wish.

The tunnelling caper brings back Bosch’s memories of being one of the tunnel rats rooting out Vietcong insurgents. Meadows had been in his team. Some memories never go away. He pulls out a scrapbook: ‘The pages were yellowed and had gone brown at the edges. They were brittle, much like the memories the photos evoked’ (p71).

‘The photos were of the smiling faces of young men who had dropped down into hell and had come back to smile into the camera. Out of the blue and into the black is what they called going into a tunnel. Each one was a black echo. Nothing but death is there. But, still, they went’ (p72).

His flashbacks are powerfully done; Bosch was only twenty and witnessed the mutilation of a comrade. And he was afraid, very afraid. ‘It was like going to hell. You’re down there and you could smell your own fear. It was like you were dead when you were down there’ (p192).

After being demobbed, not surprisingly Bosch suffered from a sleep disorder. ‘There was no going back to repair what had happened. You can’t patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid’ (p77).

The relationship between Wish and Bosch becomes close and is handled well. Inevitably, Bosch is not a great lover of authority and has his issues with the police and FBI hierarchy, and even has blistering encounters with a couple of Internal Affairs goons.

There are plenty of tense moments, a second tunnel robbery seems probable, and it seems that not everyone is what they seem…

An excellent crime novel with a satisfying ending. The first of twenty-four Bosch books. I’d previously read the fifth Bosch book, Trunk Music in 1998, out of sequence but that was not a problem. I’ll be reading the next three in order: The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote.

Bosch was also a TV series (2014-2021) on Amazon and was well received.

London's Old Bailey trial on organ harvesting

This week's trial at London's Old Bailey regarding the planned illegal harvesting of a man's kidney highlights aspects of this dark trade. Inspired by similar cases over the last few years, here is: 

ORGAN SYMPHONY

Published by Rough Edges Press, Las Vegas, USA

 

Leon Cazador, half-English, half-Spanish private eye, is on FBI liaison duty in Charleston, South Carolina when a dead child is found with a kidney missing. Suspecting an old foe, he jumps into action when a convoy of trucks with kidnapped children hits a snag, and a boy escapes. But what starts out as a simple cat-and-mouse chase turns into a convoluted web of deceit involving an underground organ transplant ring that surpasses Leon’s darkest expectations.

Years later—and carrying around the weight of unresolved burdens—Leon runs into suspicious activity in Córdoba, Spain that makes his heart stop cold. Organ traffickers are running rampant, and a three-man investigating team has gone missing. Eager to put an end to this corrupt organization’s misdeeds once and for all, Leon makes finding its leader his top priority. But will he be able to take down an evil like no other?

Nik Morton lives in Blyth, Northumberland. His two earlier Leon Cazador thrillers are Rogue Prey and No Prisoners. He can be contacted at mortonnik@gmail.com His latest release from Rough Edges Press is Catalyst – Cat’s Crusade #1. 

Amazon UK: https://tinyurl.com/szhr9s82 

Amazon US: https://tinyurl.com/y2hdryym

‘Women spies are useless’

Who said the Cold War was dead?

Latest spy scandal comes from the US, where a Russian spy cell was suspected of plotting a ‘Wall Street meltdown’. Igor Sporyshev, one of three alleged plotters, has been arrested; the other two fled the country; Russia claims there is no evidence against the trio. The FBI previously snared ten Russian spies in 2010, one of whom became quite notorious: Anna Chapman. She was arrested, along with nine others, on 27 June 2010, on suspicion of working for the Illegals Program, a spy ring under the Russian Federation's external intelligence agency, the SVR.

Anna Chapman - Wikipedia commons

 

Apparently, Anna Kushchyenko moved to London about 2003 and worked at a few companies, including Barclays. She met Alex Chapman at a party in London Docklands and they married shortly after in Moscow. She gained dual Russian–British citizenship (subsequently revoked) and a British passport.

After being formally charged, Chapman and the other nine detainees were part of a spy swap deal between the United States and Russia, the biggest of its kind since 1986. They returned to Russia via a chartered jet that landed at Vienna, where the swap occurred on the morning of 8 July 2010.

Since then Anna Chapman has received a mixed reception from Russians and the certain sections of the international circuit, in part due to her blatant self-publicity and raunchy photo-shoots. She has a twitter account, and is a TV personality in Russia.

According to today’s news reports, a conversion was taped by the FBI: Igor Sporyshev stated that it was misguided to value female secret agents. Apparently, he said, ‘I have lots of ideas about such girls but these ideas are not actionable because they don’t allow you to get close enough… you either have to have sex with them or use other levers to influence them to execute your requests.’

It has been bandied about that women make bad spies. According to one book,

All the great masters of espionage have distrusted women spies and feared them. Hitler’s spymaster Reinhard Heydrich opposed them on principle. Richard Sorge, the greatest spy of modern times, said, ‘Women are absolutely unfitted for espionage work. Intimate relations… arouse jealousy… and react to the detriment of the cause.’ … In other words, the secret service professionals know that women cannot keep their espionage assignments separate from their emotions and erotic instincts. – The Real World of Spies, Charles Wighton (1965).

The above chauvinist and provocative comments don’t do justice to the many female agents, some of whom gave their lives in WWII and afterwards – many of them unknown and unsung because of their work.

And of course one such person is Tana Standish, psychic spy of the 1970s and 1980s. Her first mission for the British Secret Intelligence Service occurred in 1965. (see my blog here).

The Prague Papers relates her second mission in Czechoslovakia in 1975, published by Crooked Cat books. It is followed on 17 February by The Tehran Text, her assignment in Iran in 1978. Both are e-books only.

 

 

THE PRAGUE PAPERS

 Available from Amazon UK here
and from Amazon COM here
 

1978. Iran is in ferment and the British Intelligence Service wants Tana Standish’s assessment. It appears that CIA agents are painting too rosy a picture, perhaps because they’re colluding with the state torturers… Allegiances and loyalties are strained as Tana’s mission becomes deadly and personal. Old friends are snatched, tortured and killed by SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police. She has to use all her skills as a secret agent and psychic to stay one step ahead of the oppressors and traitors.

As the country stumbles towards the Islamic Revolution, the Shah’s grip on power weakens. There’s real concern for the MI6 listening post near the Afghan border. Only Tana Standish is available to investigate; yet it’s possible she could be walking into a trap, as the deadly female Spetsnaz fighter Aksakov has been sent to abduct Tana. Meanwhile, in Kazakhstan, the sympathetic Yakunin, the psychic spy tracking Tana, is being sidelined by a killer psychic, capable of weakening Tana at the critical moment in combat with Aksakov. Can Yakunin save Tana without being discovered?

In the troubled streets of Iran’s ancient cities and amidst the frozen wastes on the Afghan border, Tana makes new friends and new enemies...

 

 

Reviews of The Prague Papers

... Well plotted and executed this is a story that held me enthralled and intrigued from the first page to the last...and then I read the epilogue, and I realised just how eye-opening this novel is. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I’m so relieved that there is more to come. - Amazon review, 21 Jan, 2015

 

Morton's heroine Tana is made of stern stuff... - Michael Parker, author of The Devil’s Trinity and The Third Secret

Interestingly, Morton sells it as a true story passed to him by an agent and published as fiction, a literary ploy often used by master thriller writer Jack Higgins. Let’s just say that it works better than Higgins. - Danny Collins, author of The Bloodiest Battles

… gave me that feeling of “being there myself”, rubbing shoulders with his characters, and for quite a while after finishing it, I found myself thinking about them and all they had been through. - William Daysh, author of Over by Christmas

As well as creating memorable characters, Morton captures the essence of Prague and the Czech soul, educates us into the world of Eastern Bloc politics, and tells an intricate tale of espionage... - Maureen Moss, Travel journalist.

THE TEHRAN TEXT

Available from Amazon COM here

 

And available from Amazon UK here