Book Review: Echo Park

This is another book by author Michael Connelly (I just reviewed another book by him last week).  Below is a synopsis:

Bestseller Connelly's compelling 12th Harry Bosch novel (after 2005's The Closers) offers some new wrinkles on a familiar theme—the aging detective haunted by the one who got away. In Bosch's case, the elusive quarry is the man who abducted a 22-year-old equestrian, Marie Gesto, in 1993. Having returned to active duty as a member of the LAPD Open-Unsolved Unit, Bosch repeatedly pulls the file to see if he can discover something new and give some small solace to the victim's parents. When a chance police stop of a suspicious vehicle nets serial killer Raynard Waits, who's carrying body parts in his van, Bosch assesses the murderer's claim that he was responsible for killing Gesto, too. The weary and cynical detective soon suspects that Waits is trying to barter information for a reduced sentence of life imprisonment. Political motivations connected with the upcoming DA election also cloud the investigation. Smooth prose and plausible characters—even the secondary figures—elevate this several notches above the standard cop vs. serial-killer thriller.

This isn't the first Bosch novel in the series, so I pretty much started out of order.  And that's ok.  I don't think this is one (series) that necessarily needs to be read in order to make sense.  Echo Park is definitely a great crime thriller.

I did, however, notice one similarily to The Lincoln Lawyer, which I read last week - it was another book that got off to a slow start, but finished with a bang.  Once these books reach a certain point, the story seriously picks up and the books are impossible to put down.  It's just getting to that point that is the hard part!  But now that I'm getting familiar with Connelly's writing style, I feel more invested in his books.  In fact, I just started another one today.