The Wrong Side of Goodbye
by Michael Connelly
Orion

Michael Connelly was one of the world’s best crime writers long before the stellar Hieronymus Bosch television series was adapted from his novels. Working as a policeman in a Los Angeles that Raymond Chandler would have admired (at once damned and beautiful), Bosch is attractive, uncompromising and driven by his personal demons. The Wrong Side of Goodbye only enhances Connelly’s status. Booted out of the LAPD, Bosch treads the formulaic path of many ageing coppers: the private eye. Bosch being Bosch, he only accepts cases by word of mouth. Here he takes two. Whitney Vance is a billionaire also of Chandleresque proportions: living in present luxury but haunted by the past. Vance wants Bosch to find out whether he fathered a child over 50 years earlier after an affair with a Mexican girl. In San Fernando, Bosch helps an almost bankrupt police force chase the Screen Cutter, a rapist with nasty disguises and unnerving access to his victims’ private lives. Connelly weaves these strands into a juggernaut meditation on time, distant and near, without ever dulling the thrills.