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.

Book review - More to Life

The fictionalised travel memoir More to Life (2017),  'based on real events', is by Maureen Moss, an inveterate globetrotter. It is at turns illuminating, poignant and amusing.

Approaching her fiftieth year, suffering the trauma of divorce, loss of job and sale of house, Rachael Green decides to ‘find herself’ by travelling to the Far East. Small snag: she has three children, two of them teenagers. It’s agreed she’ll take Conrad and Sara, leaving the youngest Sophie with her ex. Sophie can join them at the tail-end of their jaunt in Australia. Simple, really. Brave. Or possibly foolhardy. These events take place in 1997; it might be riskier attempting this kind of journey these days.

First stop, the Indian subcontinent. We’re treated to the sights, smells, the poverty, and the wonderful tigers. Travelling on a shoe-string budget meant that their accommodation wasn’t quite what they were used to. ‘In our dark, damp, dingy, smelly rooms cockroaches scurried up the walls, across the ceiling and down the opposite side. Sitting on the toilet in the one-metre-square shower room required keeping your feet above the floor level to avoid the creatures scrambling over your toes.’ (p117)

From time to time, Rachael sends a letter to Sophie, possibly to sooth her angst over leaving her daughter. And her thoughts dwelled on her decision: ‘I was hauling them around places where dead bodies lay unnoticed, where extreme poverty and physical deformities were commonplace, and where parents had to sell their children.’ (p118)

There are plenty of amusing interludes to lighten the mood, such as travelling in a railway compartment designed for six people yet accommodating fifteen, some of whom used the luggage racks as extra seating.

Then it’s on to south-east Asia, starting in Singapore, then to Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. They’re joined by Rachael’s sister-in-law Louise who has left home, and Gecko, a friend of Conrad’s, and Michael, the boyfriend of Sara. These additional mouths to feed strain the budget further, but provide more conflict, amusement and distractions: penalty for removing pebbles from the beach, five to ten years’ imprisonment. Rachael says she reads a lot on the journey – though doesn’t explain what; was this before the e-reader? Then there’s Sara’s scream, when a huge cricket jumped in between her boobs! (p165) and Michael’s worry about safety when they’re floating in the river in a boat made from a B52 bomber fuel tank – during a lightning storm! (p166)

I don’t know why Rachael should feel she needs to atone for being part of the human race, for being one of a species capable of the appalling slaughter and inhumanity of the Pol Pot regime. You can be appalled without feeling misplaced guilt, surely? (p182)

From the tragic to the frivolous. There’s a joke that Rachael makes about the Mekong Delta, referring to the emperor from the Flash Gordon adventures. Unfortunately, the Mekon was a Dan Dare villain; Emperor Ming was the Flash Gordon villain! As Sara observed, ‘You’re funny, Ma – not.’

The book is teeming with vivid description, such as: ‘Images flashed past, of baskets suspended from shoulder poles, water buffalo gently swishing their tails in muddy rivers, field workers in conical hats bent low as they toiled. In the villages barefoot skinny children played in rubbish-strewn streets… monkeys approached lopsidedly to steal bananas…’ (p192)

Of all the places she visited Rachael seemed most affected by Vietnam and its stoic gentle people. (p237)

Did Rachael ‘find herself’? You’ll need to read this always entertaining, colourful and thought-provoking book to find out. At the very least she proved that there’s more to life than feeling sorry for yourself. Highly recommended.

A shorter version of this review will appear on Amazon.

FFB - Koko

This Friday’s forgotten book was published in 1988; a departure for Peter Straub, moving from supernatural elements to thriller. But this is a thriller with a difference, with over 600 pages. It concerns four survivors of the same platoon whose service in Vietnam culminated in an atrocity in a small village, Ia Thoc. Four men from totally different backgrounds, who chose different paths in life, Dr. Michael Poole, ‘baby doctor’; Harry ‘Beans’ Beevers, the ‘the world's worst lieutenant’, now a lawyer; Tina Pumo, Pumo the Puma, a NYC restaurateur; and wild little Conor Linklater, a skilled carpenter.

Fifteen years later, they reunite to investigate a series of murders in the Far East: the killer stuffs one of the regiment’s playing cards into his victim’s mouth, mutilates him, and identifies himself with a name they all once shared – Koko.

Koko is rich in characterisation, suspense and horror. And irony: ex-Lieutentant Beevers is the instigator of the search for the Koko killer because he can see the potential for a best-seller non-fiction book and even a mini-series. There are flashbacks, some graphic, snatched from the memories of the main characters; each in their way adding another piece to the puzzle of why they acted as they did.

Dr Poole observes that ‘improbability and violence overflowed from ordinary life, and Stephen King seemed to know that.’ So does Straub. Time and again someone would enter a room and I would wonder if the killer was there, ready to pounce; and even when he did, the suspense continued.

Some of the characters were not particularly pleasant yet I still cared what happened to them – well, with the exception of Beevers! And as the search progressed and the identity of the killer changed, sympathy began to creep in. For Koko is a story about a haunting: as ‘if Vietnam was their real life and everything else just afterglow.’ It is a pleasure to read, notwithstanding the coarse language and graphic brutality depicted.

‘Terror has many layers’ says one of the characters, and so has Koko.

This is a psychological horror thriller, touching upon Vietnam, the ironies and terror of that conflict, but mainly it is about people sucked into the past. A memorable page-turner.

(Indeed, so memorable that some years after reading Koko, when I acquired a book for Solstice, A Dark Time by William Patrick Hackett, I felt resonances of Koko, though Hackett’s is wholly original and to be recommended).

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A Dark Time.

This is one of those big and long American novels that defy definition, with several characters seemingly disconnected until the connections are made - none of which seem contrived. The odyssey we share with Danza and O’Neil is believable and traumatic. I certainly sensed a layer of nihilism running through the tale. What indeed is the point of a life? Maybe examining that question in the so-called ‘flower power’ period, where everything wasn’t all about ‘love’, gives us one answer; it was just as dark and nasty as any other decade. In fact, ultimately, life is to be lived. This book has the potential to become a powerful movie; a tour de force.

- Nik Morton