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Angels Flight
Michael Connelly
Orion paperback, 512 pages, £5.99
Published April 1999
ISBN 0752826204
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)

What is it about kiddie-fiddling? Used to be we drew the curtains or gave that sweaty neighbour a sly sideways glance if we saw him washing the car of a Sunday morning. Now it’s everywhere. We’re all at it, so to speak. You can’t turn on the telly or open a book without abused youngsters come tumbling out like so much dirty laundry. Such a to-do for the new taboo.

And it’s lazy. Very lazy. It’s all too frequently there just to get a rise, and, regrettably, it works. That’s what it does at the heart of Michael Connelly’s latest. Kiddie-fiddlers, paedophile websites, racial tensions in the City of Angels: all the right buttons to merit himself one of those ugly cardboard standees at airport bookstores.

Hotshot black civil rights lawyer Howard Elias is found gunned down on the eve of a major suit against the LAPD. His client is a man found not guilty in the kidnapping and killing of a 12 year-old white girl. A black man. So light the blue touch paper. Or call Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch (spiteful parents or smartarse author?), an honest cop adrift on a sea of corruption. Can he find Elias’ killer, solve the previous case and keep the lid on post-Rodney King Los Angeles? Three guesses.

Angels Flight (and yes, the lack of apostrophe does feel somehow wrong) is a well greased machine. It stamps out cookie-cutter characters, inks in a tourist guide view of the city and spews up ribbons of wannabe tough, information-packed dialogue; exactly what it says on the box. Connelly’s prose is adequate to the task but nothing more. And then only chasing bad guys – on the odd occasion he strays in to Bosch’s brief, disintegrating marriage (‘You break my heart, Eleanor. I always hoped that I could make you feel alive again.’) the book piles on clichés like Vanessa Feltz piles on the pounds. He’s awful on emotions, can’t write women for toffee, and his insights into the city’s complex, seething race relations are tissue thin.

Harrison Ford will play Bosch on film. Figures.