Review of Black Ice by Michael Connelly

The Black Ice is Michael Connelly’s second novel to feature the Hollywood detective, Hieronymous ‘Harry’ Bosch.

The Black Ice of the title is a new designer drug concocted from heroin, cocaine and PCP, which is being hawked in LA by a Mexican drug baron. I don’t know if its real or not, but it certainly sounds potent.

Harry hear over the wire of the discovery of the dead body of a fellow copy, Cal Moore, a member of the drug team. He knows he shouldn’t but decides to go across town to check out what has happened to him. His excuse is that he is vaguely involved in a case he’s working on, the murder of a known dealer, Jimmy ‘Kapps’.

As soon as Harry pops his head round the door of the apartment where Cal has been found, his chief is on him ordering him not to get involved, that the IAD team are looking into it.

When back at the station his lieutenant is on at him about trying to solve some cases because the numbers of unsolved crimes are too high, and then hands over the all the cases of one of his colleagues, Porter, who has requested a transfer. One of the cases is a dead Mexican, Juan Doe, found in a dumpster at the rear of a restaurant known as a regular haunt of Moore’s drug team.

The case continues to build up for Harry when he finds that Cal wasn’t a suicide as first suspected but was in fact murdered. After this he begins to put things together and connect his Juan Doe to Cal’s murder and thereafter to the murder of Porter, the lush, who Harry inherited the Juan Doe case from.

As the momentum builds up, Cal realises he must go down to Calexico/Mexicali on the border with Mexico to look into a company who sterilise medflies to control their population in California. This is the front he believes that is being used to smuggle Black Ice out of Mexico.
Calexico is also the hometown of Cal Moore and he thinks there are reasons there for the way Cal has behaved recently.

In addition, there is a very powerful drug baron, Zorrillo, who is based down there and is probably tied up with the whole story.

The book is quite complicated and does take its time to get to the denouement. I mean, there’s even a graphic bull fighting scene which I’ve never some across in a book before!
There are twists and turns and Harry is as laconic as he was in his previous outing, Black Echo,(cf). All very enjoyable.