Indubbiamente un thriller che si legge tutto di un fiato ma ragionando poi a freddo devo fare alcune osservazioni.
La trama è si intricata e piena di colpi di scena ma gli avvenimenti sembrano più "scene di un film" spesso inverosimili e dove tutto succede per agevolare lo scorrere dei fatti...
Comunque per tutti i fan di Harry Bosch è un libro da leggere assolutamente.
Concordo su chi scrive che il titolo è abbastanza assurdo. ( )

Harry is back in LA and back in the police - which makes the stories work a lot better. Not that I did not enjoy the Las Vegas and PI novels but something was missing in them - Harry, even when being his usual surly loner self, works better inside of the system than outside of it.

At the end of a previous novel, Kiz Rider not only convinced him to come back to the force (in the Open-Unsolved Unit - the LA police name for the usual Cold Cases department) but also transferred to become his partner as well. At the start of this novel, they get handed what looks like a present - a man confessing to multiple murders, including one which had been on Harry's mind since it happened more than a decade earlier.

Early in his return to the force, the chef of police warns Harry that his biggest obstacle will not be time but the police itself. That turns out to be almost prophetic - because the more he digs, the more he starts finding things which sound as if the original investigation was tainted and Harry and his then partner Edgar had missed a major clue. The investigation becomes not just a crusade to find the truth about a dead girl but also a rethinking of Harry's idea of himself as an investigator. It does not help that the case starts hinting at a racial angle and at least one member of the police having had reasons to hide some of the evidence.

As is usual for the novels in the series, the truth comes out at the end - in more than one way. One of the better novels in the series - I enjoy most of them anyway but that one is better than most of the rest. ( )

The best Bosch novel I've read in a while. The book move fast with the usual LA detail. Characters were filled in on the fly and went well with the action. Echo Park was the basis for most the first year of the Bosch series. The ending went a little fast and the shallowness of the Walling love interest grated. Almost a rare 5. ( )

When a book series hits the double digit number of installments it can sometimes fall victim to reader fatigue, or to repetition, but such is definitely not the case with Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, at least not for me. I found myself at book 12 of this long-running series, faced with one narrative thread already explored in the TV show that led me to these books, and yet my immersion in the story never faltered for a single moment, confirming once again that the author’s skills are such that he can ensnare his readers with a masterful mix of action, mystery and character development. And keep doing so again and again.

In Echo Park, Bosch goes back to one of the unsolved cases that still haunt him, that of Marie Gesto, a young woman who disappeared more than ten years prior and whose body was never found - only her neatly folded clothes were discovered inside an abandoned car, and the lack of further clues prevented the investigators from successfully closing the case. No one is more surprised than Bosch to be called by the office of the District Attorney for an unexpected development: a man has been recently apprehended with the remains of a victim inside his van, and eager to commute the death penalty with a life sentence the killer, whose name is Raynard Waits, is ready to indicate the location for the bodies of other so far undisclosed victims - among them that of Marie Gesto.

The fly in this very intriguing ointment is that at the time of the original investigation Bosch and his partner might have overlooked a vital clue that could have led them to Waits, and so spared the life of the people he killed after Marie: ridden by guilt and by the suspicion that there might be more to Waits than what’s on the surface, Bosch retraces his steps in a frantic search for answers, while the usual political maneuverings and a convoluted plot cross inexorably with the cold case investigation…

What comes immediately to the fore in Echo Park is the stark reality of the story itself: the theme of the serial killer might be an often-used one in crime/thriller novels, but here it’s combined with the political dealings inherent in law enforcement and the need to present public figures in the best light possible in view of an election, so that even the sordid leverage offered by a multiple offender can be exploited by an individual’s ambition. The story goes through a number of false leads and red herrings that in the hands of a less skilled writer might have looked implausible, but that here manage to keep the narrative flow at a sustained pace and the tension at the highest levels. Not to mention that in real life that’s what does indeed happen as an investigation goes through a number of false starts and dead ends before (if ever) reaching the desired conclusion.

As for Bosch, this novel sees him almost at his wits’ end when it seems that Marie’s killer was within reach and he missed him by a proverbial hairbreadth: nothing could be worse for a relentless investigator such as he than realizing he did not pursue every little detail to its very end. This situation is something of a setback as far as his personality is concerned, because where the previous two books had shown a more sedated Harry Bosch, a man finally capable of thinking things through before charging headfirst into situations, here he seems to somehow revert to his older self, the “Lone Ranger cop” afflicted with tunnel vision. This relapse ends up affecting his renewed working and sentimental relationship with FBI agent Rachel Walling and souring the partnership with colleague Kiz Rider, who had so far proved to be a stabilizing influence on Bosch. With the former, one can see how it would be difficult - if not impossible - for him to maintain a stable emotional tie with a woman, since the drive to solve cases always becomes the main focus for his energies, shunting everything and everyone else to the sidelines. With the latter, he ends up breaking what is the necessary bond of trust between working teammates, jeopardizing safety and careers for them both, as Kiz points out with no little bitterness:

Maybe at some point you will trust me enough to ask my opinion before you go off and make decisions that affect both of us.

What I found once again surprising is how much Michael Connelly can keep me invested in this character’s journey even when I see how much his tunnel vision and self-centeredness can estrange him from the people around him: I enjoy reading about Bosch even though I don’t always like him - for me this is the mark of very skilled writing, indeed.

Probably, one of the most intriguing sides of this story comes from the parallels between Bosch and the killer Waits: both of them orphaned at a young age, both of them taken in by disinterested foster families, both of them spending some time in the same institution for troubled youths - and yet taking two opposite paths in life. Where Waits, as Bosch muses at the end of the investigation, picked his victims with the unconscious objective of killing his own mother over and over again, Bosch on the other hand tries to solve his mother’s murder over and over again by relentlessly seeking justice for the victims, particularly those no one seems to care about. And here the author offers a striking image for the theme of “nature vs. nurture” relaying the theory of the two “dogs” we have inside us, one good and one bad: the person we turn out to be depends on which “dog” we choose to feed. Meaning, probably, that the border between good and evil is even thinner than we can imagine…

As usual, the resolution is a very unexpected one, even though part of this story was already familiar to me thanks to the TV series: there might be something of an… embarrassment of riches, so to speak, in the plots within plots revealed in the ending, but it’s only a small crease in an otherwise very enjoyable tapestry. So… onward to the next one! ( )

My first read by Connelly and I really enjoyed it. Good pace and well written.

I don’t care for the actor who plays Bosch in the TV series - glad this did not get in the way of my enjoying this book.

I will pick up the first in the series soon. ( )