"Down these mean streets a man must go who is himself not mean." Raymond ChandlerBlack Echo is a successful hybrid of the hard-boiled detective genre and the police procedural genre. Black Echo's hero, Hieronymous 'Harry' Bosch, is an ex-street rat turned Vietnam vet turned LA cop who, like all good hard-boiled detectives, is a loner. He's also famous for breaking two high publicity cases one of which was made into a TV movie which in turn evolved into a successful television show with an actor played Bosch weekly. Bosch is also infamous for being involved in a 'did he or didn't he' shooting of a serial killer that could have been either self defense, as Bosch claims, or could have been a cold blooded execution. Black Echo's writer, Michael Connelly, is a veteran Los Angeles crime reporter which gives him the background to do an especially good job on the book's police procedural aspect and on the personalities of the cops Bosch works with. The only real disappointment with Black Echo is that the solution to it's mystery was pretty cliched and thus glaringly obvious. Other then that Black Echo was a good first entry in what has become an on-going series.
