The Black Ice

Product Description <br/>Narcotics officer Cal Moore's orders were to look into the city's latest drug killing. Instead, he ends up in a motel room with his head in several pieces and a suicide note stuffed in his back pocket.<br/><br/>Years ago, Harry Bosch learned the first rule of the good cop: don't look for the facts, but the glue that holds them together. Now, Harry's making some very dangerous connections, starting with one dead cop and leading to a bloody string of murders that winds from Hollywood Boulevard's drug bazaar to the dusty back alleys south of the border and into the center of a complex and lethal game—one in which Harry is the next and likeliest victim.<br/><br/> From Publishers Weekly <br/>In this surehanded sequel to The Black Echo , LAPD detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch stalks drug traffickers in L.A. and Mexico.<br/>Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.<br/> Review <br/>"Hard-bitten...complex and convincing."-- San Diego Union-Tribute<br/><br/>"Strong and sure...this novel establishes Connelly as a writer with superior talent for storytelling." "Publishers Weekly""<br/><br/>"Hard-bitten...complex and convincing." "San Diego Union-Tribute""<br/><br/>"Gripping...one of the finest police-procedural novels...Miss it at your peril." "Virginia-Pilot and the Ledger Star""<br/> From Kirkus Reviews <br/>Second tense, tightly wound tangle of a case for Hieronymous Bosch (The Black Echo, 1991). This time out, the LAPD homicide cop, who's been exiled to Hollywood Division for his bumptious behavior, sniffs out the bloody trail of the designer drug ``black ice.'' Connelly (who covers crime for the Los Angeles Times) again flexes his knowledge of cop ways--and of cop-novel clich‚s. Cast from the hoary mold of the maverick cop, Bosch pushes his way onto the story's core case--the apparent suicide of a narc--despite warnings by top brass to lay off. Meanwhile, Bosch's boss, a prototypical pencil-pushing bureaucrat hoping to close out a majority of Hollywood's murder cases by New Year's Day, a week hence, assigns the detective a pile of open cases belonging to a useless drunk, Lou Porter. One of the cases, the slaying of an unidentified Hispanic, seems to tie in to the death of the narc, which Bosch begins to read as murder stemming from the narc's dirty involvement in black ice. When Porter is murdered shortly after Bosch speaks to him, and then the detective's love affair with an ambitious pathologist crashes, Bosch decides to head for Mexico, where clues to all three murders point. There, the well-oiled, ten- gear narrative really picks up speed as Bosch duels with corrupt cops; attends the bullfights; breaks into a fly-breeding lab that's the distribution center for Mexico's black-ice kingpin; and takes part in a raid on the kingpin's ranch that concludes with Bosch waving his jacket like a matador's cape at a killer bull on the rampage. But the kingpin escapes, leading to a not wholly unexpected twist--and to a touching assignation with the dead narc's widow. Expertly told, and involving enough--but lacking the sheer artistry and heart-clutching thrills of, say, David Lindsay's comparable Stuart Haydon series (Body of Evidence, etc.). --<br/>Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.<br/> From the Back Cover <br/>It should have been his case. But the LAPD brass are all over the crime scene so fast that Detective Harry Bosch scarcely gets a look at the body before the case is taken out of his hands. The corpse in the motel room is identified as that of a narcotics officer who'd been missing for several days. Rumor has it that Internal Affairs had been after him, that he'd crossed over, fronting a new drug called black ice that has infiltrated from Mexico. As the media mount a frenzy of speculation, the police department hastily declares the death a suicide. Bosch isn't so sure. The note - "I found out who I was" - is cryptic at best. The motel room has clearly been wiped clean of all fingerprints except the victim's. An