47 books like Resurrection Walk

Michael Connelly continues to hit it out of the park when it comes to police procedurals. The Dark Hours is the fourth of his five novels about a young LAPD detective, Renee Ballard, who works “the late show” (the nighttime hours) and catches a midnight murder. She seeks assistance from a friend—the semi-retired detective, Harry Bosch—in working the case. I’ve read every one of Connelly’s Bosch Series books and have loved them all. Once you become involved and engrossed—usually by the third page—you cannot stop reading! Connelly’s novels are that good. 

In the ninth book featuring Connelly’s iconic character, (now retired) LAPD detective Harry Bosch, the quintessential modern knight errant is working a case that’s haunted him for years – the murder of Angella Benton.

Her death might be linked to a bold and bloody robbery of 2 million dollars from a movie set where she worked as a production assistant, but neither crime was ever solved. Now Harry is intent on finding Angella’s killer.

The story is set against the backdrop of the movie industry and the celebrity-obsessed culture of Hollywood. Unimpressed by the trappings of power, Harry follows his instincts, led only by his guiding principle, “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

But this time, he’s on his own without a badge or backup, and when his investigation hits very close to home, Harry finds himself facing brutal enemies determined to strike him down. 

The Harry Bosch series has been long and often predictable.

Bosch has a strong belief that if everybody doesn’t count, nobody counts. He has to hold up his image of justice against an LAPD that plays politics, and a city populace easily swayed by the latest headlines.

What I love about The Last Coyote is that it’s a very personal novel where Bosch examines his relationship with his deceased mother Marjorie Phillips Lowe, a prostitute who was brutally murdered. While on psychiatric leave, Bosch takes on the case of his mother’s unsolved murder.

It’s a wonderfully nuanced exploration of the relationship between a mother and son, a cop and his own psyche, and a city and its most reviled citizens.

I’ve always enjoyed mysteries, especially police procedural stories. Harry Bosch is the kind of detective that you want to root for. During his lengthy career, Bosch followed the motto that ‘everybody counts or nobody counts.’ That approach speaks volumes to me, especially when writing my own stories.

Investigating a cold case homicide requires turning over all the evidence, digging into the interviews, and developing new theories and suspects. This is dramatically different from a ‘fresh’ case, where there can be pressure from multiple directions to find the guilty party and bring them to justice quickly.

I like Connelly’s style and have read every one of his books that I can get my hands on. Bosch ruffles feathers, but gets it done!

I liked this novel because I was in Vietnam, have friends forever changed by contact with the mad god Mars, and could easily relate to the main character.

After his time in the military, Vietnam war tunnel rat Harry Bosch has to fight his own PTSD as well as very real present dangers in his job with the Los Angeles police force. Since I have studied the L.A. police for some of my novels, Connelly’s writing rings very true to me.

I don’t think Connelly’s intention was to write horror, but his visceral description of the corpses and the minutia of murder in this novel made my stomach churn. An unpleasant experience, yes, but it’s vivid and effective writing. Harry Bosch is a detective with weakness for a specific type of woman, and of course he gets mixed up with Julia, a hot tomato who’s new to the force, and of course she messes up his investigation into the bones. You might want to kick Bosch in the caboose for not thinking more lucidly, but eventually he manages to outsmart his villains.

Known for his Lincoln Lawyer and Harry Bosch crime/mystery series, this novel is the first one about Connelly’s investigative reporter Jack McAvoy.

I really enjoyed the immersion of the protagonist into the journalism newsroom world as he tries to link his brother’s unexpected murder to a series of nationwide murders.

With all odds against him, I liked the way Jack kept fighting the upstream battle to arrive at an astonishing conclusion to the case.

I’ve never been able to resist the allure of a mystery with the fast, hard-driving pace of a Chandler-style noir story, the kind that Matt Coyle serves up in Yesterday’s Echo, the first in his Rick Cahill series.

Cahill is the perfect old-style protagonist: tough, honest, noble, and haunted by the past. An ex-cop and one-time suspect in his wife’s murder, he’s spent eight years building a new life when a beautiful woman tempts him with love.

After she’s arrested for murder, Cahill is drawn into a vicious web that again paints him as a potential killer and pulls him back into the blurred limelight of his wife’s death.

The story is superbly crafted and opens the door to an award-winning series. Not to be missed.   

I am a huge fan of mystery novels written by Michael Connelly featuring the detective Harry Bosch, so I was delighted to read Jill Leovy’s account of real-life homicide detectives in Los Angeles working under very difficult circumstances to provide a measure of justice to otherwise ignored crime victims and their families.

The book does a wonderful job of documenting the craft of good police work and shows how poorly functioning formal legal systems – a legacy of Jim Crow – negatively impacts Black communities.

As the fictional detective Harry Bosch likes to say, “everyone counts or no one counts.”

Leovy’s book shows what it takes for that vision of everyone counting to become a reality. 

For me, reading a Harry Bosch novel is like inviting an old friend to dinner and catching up over beers. The Black Ice is the 2nd installment in Michael Connelly's Bosch series, published back in 1993, but recently re-released as a paperback.

Whether it's an old book or a new one, I can't get enough of Harry Bosch. There’re still a few stories I haven't read yet, but the television series has filled in a lot of the blanks. I think I've seen each episode at least five times now.

The Black Ice is a good story, about a Robbery/Homicide case that should have been assigned to Bosch, but he inserts himself into it anyway. The plot moves well and kept me interested throughout. And, if you're a really sharp detective, you might pick up on a couple of clues as to the major twist at the end.