Has Anyone Read CITY OF BONES?

Cafe Society
1

If you’ve read CITY OF BONES by Michael Connelly and would like to chat about it, I’ve got a couple of questions for you?

  1. How did Officer Brasher REALLY die?
  2. Are you satisfied with the ending?
2

  1. Brasher shot herself in the shoulder. Instead of the bullet going nice and neat through her, it hit a bone and essentially did a Waring Blender number in her chest cavity.

  2. Nope. No sir. Not at all. Considering that Bosch had been in the business over a quarter-century, it’s difficult to believe that he would give it up over, what, seeing officers kill a suspect? The death of a woman he was fond of but, really, didn’t know well?

Connelly’s series has been praised very highly, and I think he’s a good writer, but this book wasn’t one of his better efforts. I posted a review of this book on my Web site.posted on my Web site.

3

I liked your review, pesch, but I’m not sure I agree with you about Brasher. I thought that part of the book was particularly muddily written. I got the impression that Bosch shot her. . . to keep her from shooting Stokes. However, you’re probably right. Bosch would have been more guilt-ridden if he had shot her and she died as a result. (Then again, THAT might have been the real reason for his walking away.)

I hope this isn’t the last we’ve seen of Harry Bosch. I like this character a lot. We don’t waste a lot of time with descriptions of what he’s wearing. What he’s wearing never seems to matter, while nother detectives seem to waste valuable pages with play-by-plays of their outfits.

I thought through a lost of the book that the Mom really killed Arthur. I also thought she was responsible for beating the boy. Why would a mother leave her kids with a man who was a known child abuser? And she had told Bosch that she was too young to have had the children and that they ruined everything for her. I thought she had beaten Arthur because she blamed him for wrecking her life and then walked out to keep herself from hitting him any more. I figured that he had packed his little knapsack and included the letter she left and had set off to find Mom. And when he found her, she flipped out and beat him to death!

I like my story better than the unlikely way the pieces fell into place in Connelly’s book.

4

Agreed. And, yes, the shooting was pretty muddily done. I was expecting there to be another cop who shot her. And his explanation . . . not convincing.

Anyway, I expect there’ll be more books about Harry. At least, I haven’t heard that there won’t from what little I’ve heard in the mystery community, and since this one’s on the best seller list, there’s no reason to walk away.