“OK, I did this backwards. Michael Connelly is a writer of detective fiction, but I don't recall reading any of his works. This book is basically a compilation of his newspaper crime stories for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times. Normally, true crime books are written about a single really dramatic crime, or a serial killer, and go into quite a lot of detail. This book does not; it's just the actual newspaper articles, complete with the repetition of basic facts when an update is reported. It would have been a lot more interesting if he had taken each of the half dozen most interesting stories and rewritten the newspaper articles into a thoughtful, well-organized story. Perhaps one mysterious murder that remained unsolved for along time, one organized crime killing, one about a cop killer and one about a killer cop, one pure psychopath.
I do not mean to suggest that this is a bad book, but that it might have been a great deal better. And to be fair, if I had read some of Connelly's fiction first, I might have enjoyed this one a great deal more due to recognizing the elements that went into his fiction.”
AuntB93 wrote this review Thursday, May 10, 2012.
Was this review helpful? Yes | No