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“As he drove he thought of the night before and how it had made him feel to comfort Sylvia Moore. It made him feel like a cop in a Rockwell painting. Like he had made a difference.��

Harry Bosch. LA cop. An irritant to the department but somehow, he’s still there �� just. When a dead cop is found suicided in a motel unit at Christmas, he’s not notified.

��‘So, Bosch, you should be happy you aren’t involved. It’s Christmas, for Chrissake.�� But that wasn’t good enough. Bosch should have been called and then it should have been his decision when to call out RHD [Robbery Homicide Division]. Someone had taken him out of the process altogether and that still burned him.��

He's alone at Christmas anyway. And New Year’s.

“Business is business, even on Christmas night. There were elegantly made up women sitting on bus benches who were not really women and not really waiting for buses.��

But he does know about the dead cop, Calexico “Cal�� Moore, who was estranged from his wife of many years, so Harry’s assigned to call on the widow and inform her. She is the Sylvia Moore of the opening quote. She tells him Cal was always caught up in the past, needed to revisit his time growing up in Mexico. Harry finds himself increasingly attracted to her.

He already has a friend with benefits, a medical examiner, who conveniently is the one doing the routine autopsy on Moore, to check the ID, since his face was obliterated. Turns out, she has some unusual reservations about the results. The department has none �� get on with it, find the killer, etc. But she’s already told Harry, and he becomes the classic dog with a bone.

Meanwhile, another cop, Porter, has taken sudden leave, so Lieutenant Pounds, known as ‘N���Ա�ٲ�-�𾱲������ , has dropped the cop’s caseload on Harry. They’re down to only 5 detectives on the homicide table. Note, “table��, not “department��. This was written in 1993, incidentally, a time of pagers and telexes. No cell phones or internet.

Harry finds a connection in Porter’s files between the dead cop and a body that was found dumped in an alley, Juan Doe #67. His medical examiner friend finds some interesting details about Juan Doe #67 as well.

As random details accumulate, Harry tries to create some kind of timeline and reason for the connections. It’s certainly drug-related, and seems to be part of the new Black Ice trade. In a conversation before the motel room suicide, Moore had told Harry about it.

��‘Basically, black ice and glass are the same thing. Same results. Glass comes from Hawaii. And black ice comes from Mexico. The drug of the twenty-first century, I guess you’d call it. If I was a salesman I’d say it covers all the demographics. Basically, somebody took coke, heroin and PCP and rocked ’em all up together.
. . .
What the Mexicans did was steal the recipe. They started replicating glass. Only they’re using homegrown brown heroin, including the tar. That’s the pasty shit at the bottom of the cooking barrel. Lot of impurities in it, turns it black. That’s how they come up with calling it black ice. They make it cheaper, they move it cheaper and they sell it cheaper.����

More than you wanted to know, but that phrase “The drug of the twenty-first century�� is certainly haunting, isn’t it? Harry feels a sense of obligation to Moore, although he was pretty sure Moore had ‘crossed�� (good cop to bad cop), and he definitely wants to see more of widow Sylvia.

His case-load has files that overlap, suspects and victims who seem connected to each other and to Mexico. So that’s where he goes.

Plenty of excitement and just enough introspection to make Harry interesting and human (and vulnerable) without detracting from the plot. It got more complicated as characters from LA and Mexico joined the hunt or the body count or both.

[Personal note you can skip:
I have a theory that there is a lot of tobacco money in films these days. So many stories are dated in the times when everyone smoked that I’m sure it’s keeping the company dream alive. Such a pity.

I'm speaking only of film and television, where we see people smoking. I'm not suggesting the author was promoting it! In fact, I think it's more a way to show how frayed Harry's nerves are, that it's a habit he's not intending to give up.

Harry’s a terrible smoker, by which I mean terrible that he smokes a lot and terrible that he drops butts everywhere. Tsk, tsk. But he frequently notices the nice scents of women and the foul odours of some of the men he interviews. I can only imagine how his own apartment smells. See? He’s human.]

I’ve not seen the TV series, although I’ve seen so many ads, I know what “Bosch�� looks like, so I did picture him that way (unlike “Reacher�� and Tom Cruise, the less said, the better) I enjoyed it and will no doubt enjoy the third episode some day as well.

(#1) My review of The Black Echo