Michael Connelly

“Connelly is so good… How beautifully he strews the faulty suppositions, the flawed conclusions, the false bottoms.”
— New York Daily News

“Fans of Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels will feel right at home with this beautifully constructed, powerfully resonating thriller, and newcomers will see right away that all the fuss has been about.”
—  Publishers Weekly

“Thrilling, suspenseful and securely anchored in procedure and purpose.  Not a false note; deeply satisfying stuff.”
— London Literary Review

“Compelling…A spine-tingling manhunt guaranteed to boost the blood pressure.”
— People Magazine

As he drove along Mulholland Drive toward the Cahuenga Pass, Bosch began to hear the music.  It came to him in fragments of string and errant horn sequences, echoing off the brown summer-dried hills and blurred by the white noise of traffic carrying up from the Hollywood Freeway.  Nothing he could identify.  All he knew was that he was heading toward its source.

He slowed when he saw the other cars parked off to the side of a gravel turn-off road.  Two detective sedans and a patrol car.  Bosch pulled his Caprice in behind them and got out.  A single officer in uniform leaned against the fender of the patrol car.  Yellow plastic crime-scene tape — the stuff used by the mile in Los Angeles — was strung from the patrol car’s sideview mirror across the gravel road to the sign posted on the other side.  The sign said, in black-on-white letters that were almost indistinguishable behind the graffiti that covered the sign:

           L.A.F.D. FIRE CONTROL
MOUNTAIN FIRE DISTRICT ROAD
NO PUBLIC ADMITTANCE
NO SMOKING!

 The patrol cop, a large man with sun-reddened skin and blond bristly hair, straightened up as Bosch approached.  The first thing Bosch noted about him other than his size was the baton.  It was holstered in a ring on his belt and the business end of the club was marred, the black acrylic paint scratched away to reveal the aluminum beneath.  Street fighters wore their battle-scarred sticks proudly, as a sign, a not so subtle warning.  This cop was a headbanger.  No doubt about it.  The plate above the cop’s breast pocket said his name was Powers.  He looked down at Bosch through Ray-Bans, though it was well into dusk and a sky of burnt orange clouds was reflected in his mirrored lenses.  It was one of those sundowns that reminded Bosch of the glow the fires of the riots had put in the sky a few years back.

“Harry Bosch,” Powers said with a touch of surprise.  “When did you get back on the table?”

Bosch looked at him a moment before answering.  He didn’t know Powers but that didn’t mean anything.  Bosch’s story was probably known by every cop in Hollywood Division.

“Just did,” Bosch said.

He didn’t make any move to shake hands.  You didn’t do that at crime scenes.

“First case back in the saddle, huh?”

Bosch took out a cigarette and lit it.  It was direct violation of department policy but it wasn’t something he worried about.

“Something like that.”  He changed the subject.  “Who’s down there?”

“Edgar and the new one from Pacific, his soul sister.”

“Rider.”

“Whatever.”

Bosch said nothing further about that.  He knew what was behind the contempt in the uniform cop’s voice.  It didn’t matter that he knew Kizmin Rider had the gift and was a top-notch investigator.  That would mean nothing to Powers, even if Bosch told him it was so. Powers probably saw only one reason why he was still wearing a blue uniform instead of carrying a Detective’s gold badge: that he was a white man in an era of female and minority hiring and promotion.  It was the kind of festering sore better left undisturbed.

Powers apparently registered Bosch’ s non-response as disagreement and went on.

“Anyway, they told me to let Emmy and Sid drive on down when they get here.  I guess they’re done with the search.  So you can drive down instead of walking, I guess.”

It took a second for Bosch to register that Powers was referring to the medical examiner and the Scientific Investigation Division tech.  He’s said the names as if they were a couple invited to a picnic.

Bosch stepped out to the pavement, dropped the half cigarette and made sure he put it out with his shoe.  It wouldn’t be good to start a brush fire on his first job back on the homicide table.

“I’ll walk it,” he said.  “What about Lieutenant Billets?”

“Not here yet.”

Bosch went back to his car and reached in through the open window for his briefcase.  He then walked back to Powers.

“You the one who found it?”

“That was me.”

Powers was proud of himself.

“How’d you open it?”

“Keep a slim jim in the car.  Opened the door, then popped the trunk.”

“Why?”

“The smell.  It was obvious.”

“Wear gloves?”

“Nope.  Didn’t have any.”

“What did you touch?”

Powers had to think about it for a moment.

“Door handle, the trunk pull.  That’d be about it.”

“Did Edgar or Rider take a statement?  You write something up?’

“Nothing yet.”

Bosch nodded.

“Listen, Powers, I know you’re all proud of yourself, but next time don’t open the car, okay?  We all want to be detectives but not all of us are.  That’s how crime scenes get fucked up.  And I think you know that.”

Bosch watched the cop’s face turn a dark shade of crimson and the skin go tight around his jaw.

“Listen, Bosch,” he said.  “What I know is that if I just called this in as a suspicious vehicle that smells like there’s a stiff in the trunk, then you people would’ve said, ‘What the fuck does Powers know?’ and left it there to rot in the sun until there was nothing left of your goddamn crime scene.”

“That might be true but, see, then that would be our fuckup to make.  Instead, we’ve got you fucking us up before we start.”

Powers remained angry but mute.  Bosch waited a beat, ready to continue the debate, before dismissing it.

“Can you lift the tape now, please?”

Powers stepped back to the tape.  He was about thirty-five, Bosch guessed, and had the long-practiced swagger of a street veteran.  In L.A. that swagger came to you quickly, as it had in Vietnam.  Powers held the yellow tape up and Bosch walked under.  As he passed, the cop said, “Don’t get lost.”

“Good one, Powers.  You got me there.”

“A jazzy, funky, roller coaster of a book….Connelly has it all working together here: skillful dialogue, solid plotting, nuances of race and a pace that will keep readers gasping to keep up…. His best yet.”
— Publishers Weekly

“Truly one of the year’s best entertainments.”
— Booklist

“Compelling…Connelly displays a wonderful atmospheric feel for the posh and the poor…The last pages bring things to a shocking end that should satisfy Connelly’s growing audience.”
—  Washington Post

“For those seeking the kind of action that takes more turns than a roulette wheel, “Trunk Music” is a sure bet.”
— People Magazine

By Michael Connelly, from the Limited Edition Release of The Poet.  WARNING: SPOILERS for The Poet.

After Robert Backus headed off into the darkness in the last pages of The Poet my full intention was for him to remain in the darkness, to never return, to always be out there like a killer ghost haunting my fictional world. I started writing the book in 1995. I had recently left my job as a journalist and was still struggling with the idea that as a crime novelist it would be expected that I write stories where good always vanquished evil, where the good guy caught the bad guy, where there were no loose ends — especially a jagged end like a killer left in the wind. I had spent a dozen years as a police beat reporter and I knew that reality was quite the opposite of that. People get away with murder everyday. I had written dozens and dozens of newspaper stories about murders that had gone unsolved. During the year I was writing The Poet I saw the murder case against O.J. Simpson start to self-destruct and the Los Angeles Police Department vilified for it. And so it was hard for me to turn from the reality of the world I knew and write one more murder mystery in which the sun rose at the end and all was right in the world. So I wrote The Poet with the idea that it would be a thrill ride with enough reader fulfillment at the end to overcome the dissatisfaction of having the killer ultimately get away. Before I wrote the first line — Death is my beat — I knew that the book would end with the killer slipping away into the darkness.

Now here I am eight years later, sitting in the same room at the Chateau Marmont where Jack McEvoy encountered Robert Backus, and I am trying to explain to you and myself why I have just written a sequel to The Poet. It is hard to explain, other than to simply say things have changed. That was then and this is now. Just out the window and across the balcony I no longer see the Marlboro Man’s steely eyes watching from the billboard. He has been replaced by a vanilla vodka bottle. I am different, too. And so is the world.

In the years since writing The Poet the world has grown more welcoming to me at the same time it’s become more uncertain to me. A couple years after writing The Poet I became a father and my life became wonderful and vulnerable in the same moment. As I watched my daughter grow it began to bother me that I had created a fictional world where a killer like Robert Backus could walk free. I started to long for order to be restored in that world. After all, the real world had become a place of increased fears and uncertain safety. I came to realize that the one place where I could control things was in the fictional universe that I had created. So six years after Robert Backus disappeared into the dark I made the decision to go back into that darkness to find him. And I decided to use Harry Bosch for the job. Harry is my best man. He is also a man who has become a father and knows my sense of wonder and joy and fear all at the same time. The story is called The Narrows and my hope is that it shows a bit of what I have learned since the time I decided to let a killer go free.

Yes, in reality people still get away with murder. I don’t know if that will ever change. But I have come to realize that the line between reality and the created world of a novel is thinnest when it comes to human feelings and desires. It is easy to take those across the line, traveling from fiction to reality. And so I have learned that it is important to take care in the fictional universe of your own creation. It is important to remember that the darkness into which you may banish a killer can travel. It can cross that line. I don’t want that to happen. In that respect I look at The Narrows as a story that is long overdue.

Michael Connelly
Chateau Marmont Hotel, Los Angeles
December 13, 2003

“Infernally ingenious …An irresistibly readable thriller.”
— New York Times

“Chilling…Connelly puts his foot on the gas and doesn’t let up.”
— Los Angeles Times

“An intriguing new protagonist…. Connelly doesn’t just talk about poets, he writes like one, with a spare, elegiac tone that is the perfect voice for the haunting tale he has to tell.”
— People Magazine

“On the fright level, “The Poet” ranks with Thomas Harris’ ‘The Silence of the Lambs’.”
— Fort Lauderdale News and Sun Sentinel

Death is my beat.  I make my living from it.  I forge my professional relationship on it.  I treat it with the passion and precision of an undertaker — somber and sympathetic about it when I’m with the bereaved, a skilled craftsman with it when I’m alone.  I’ve always thought the secret to dealing with death was to keep it at arm’s length.  That’s the rule.  Don’t let it breathe in your face.

But my rule didn’t protect me.  When the two detectives came for me and told me about Sean, a cold numbness quickly enveloped me.  It was like I was on the other side of the aquarium window.  I moved as if underwater — back and forth, back and forth — and looked out at the rest of the world through the glass.  From the backseat of their car I could see my eyes in the rearview mirror, flashing each time we passed beneath a streetlight.  I recognized the thousand-yard stare I had seen in the eyes of fresh widows I had interviewed over the years.

I knew only one of the two detectives, Harold Wexler.  I had met him a few months earlier when I stopped into the Pints Of for a drink with Sean.  They worked in CAPS together on the Denver PD.  I remembered Sean called him Wex.  Cops always use nicknames for each other.  Wexler’s is Wex, Sean’s, Mac.  It’s some kind of tribal bonding thing.  Some of the names aren’t complimentary but the cops don’t complain.  I know one down in Colorado Springs named Scoto whom most other cops call Scroto.  Some even go all the way and call him Scrotum, but my guess is that you have to be a close friend to get away with that.

Wexler was built like a small bull, powerful but squat.  A voice slowly cured over the years by cigarette smoke and whiskey.  A hatchet face that always seemed red the times I saw him.  I remember he drank Jim Beam over ice.  I’m always interested in what cops drink.  It tells a lot about them.  When they’re taking it straight like that,  I always think that maybe they’ve seen too many things too many times that most people never see even once.  Sean was drinking Lite beer that night, but he was young.  Even though he was the supe of the CAPs unit, he was at least ten years younger than Wexler.  Maybe in ten years he would have been taking his medicine cold and straight like Wexler.  But now I’ll never know.

I spent most of the drive out from Denver thinking about that night at the Pints Of.  Not that anything important had happened.  It was just drinks with my brother at the cop bar.  And it was the last good time between us, before Theresa Lofton came up.  That memory put me back in the aquarium.

But during the moments that reality was able to punch through the glass and into my heart, I was seized by a feeling of failure and grief.  It was the first real tearing of the soul I had experienced in my thirty-four years.  That included the death of my sister.  I was too young then to properly grieve for Sarah or even to understand the pain of a life unfulfilled.  I grieved now because I had not even known Sean was close to the edge.  He was Lite beer while all the other cops I knew were whiskey on the rocks.

Of course, I also recognized how self-pitying this kind of grief was.  The truth was that for a long time we hadn’t listened much to each other.  We had taken different paths.  And each time I acknowledged this truth the cycle of my grief would begin again.

My brother once told me the theory of the limit.  He said every homicide cop had a limit but the limit was unknown until it was reached.  He was talking about dead bodies.  Sean believed that there were just so many that a cop could look at.  It was a different number for each person.  Some hit it early.  Some put in twenty in homicide and never got close.  But there was a number.  And when it came up, that was it.  You transferred to records, you turned in your badge, you did something.  Because you just couldn’t look at another one.  And if you did, if you exceeded your limit, well, then you were in trouble.  You might end up sucking down a bullet.  That’s what Sean said.