Michael Connelly’s THE DROP begins with police detective Harry Bosch, the protagonist of this popular series, worrying about his dearth of new cases to investigate, as well as how long his career with the LAPD will last. He gets a case — two, in fact — before the opening chapter ends. Both, however, run him through some serious changes, leaving him worrying about his future in an entirely different manner.
DNA technology is responsible for the first case. Currently working with the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit, Bosch gets the test results of blood found on the body of a rape-and-murder victim from 1989. The blood matches that of Clayton Pell, a convicted sex offender living at a rehabilitation facility in LA. Bosch does the math and discovers that Pell would have been 8 at the time.
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Ariel Kafka is an inspector for the Helsinki police in the Violent Crime Unit. At the start of NIGHTS OF AWE, he is at a brutal crime scene in a train yard of two Arabs who have been shot and cut up — by all looks, a professional kill. This is only the start to the web-like mystery Kafka has to wade through.
Naturally, things only get more complicated, especially since he is Jewish, and racist ideas shine in some people’s minds. Kafka states early on that he is a cop first, a Fin second and a Jew a distant third. This does not play well with his relatives — namely, his brother, who tries to use his influence to convince Ariel to share all his information, since their temple will be playing host to an Israeli minister in the coming days.
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Shamini Flint’s Inspector Singh is so reminiscent of Tarquin Hall’s Detective Vish Puri that if you like one character, you’re sure to like the other. Both men are idiosyncratic investigators, tend to put on weight, have to deal with nagging wives, perform their tasks a little haphazardly, have an absolute passion for food, are a little cranky, and deal with their respective environments with a subtle humor. The only difference is that Inspector Singh tends to handle much darker crimes.
For instance, in A BALI CONSPIRACY MOST FOUL, the Singaporean Inspector Singh is sent to Bali in Indonesia to assist with a terrorism investigation.
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In ONE DOG NIGHT, David Rosenfelt’s ninth novel featuring wisecracking and lazy, but brilliant defense attorney Andy Carpenter, we see our protagonist struggling over a horrific case of arson, where 26 people were locked inside an apartment complex and burned to death. The suspect is one Noah Galloway, who remembers nothing of the night in question, but secretly believes he may have caused the fire.
Noah’s wife wants to enlist Carpenter to run the defense, but certainly can’t afford him, and Carpenter doesn’t want to do it, anyway. But she has an ace in the hole: Carpenter’s well-loved rescue dog, Tara, was originally owned by Noah, who put her in a shelter when the drugs got too hard for him to control. Carpenter has to meet Tara’s original owner, and once he does, decides the man is innocent.
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Released in 2008, but new to mass-market paperback, Jo Nesbø’s NEMESIS is another novel featuring the author’s unfortunately named Norwegian inspector Harry Hole. A bank robber takes a woman as hostage and indicates that the manager has a certain number of seconds to unload the ATM and give the robber the money. The manager takes a few seconds too long, so the robber kills the hostage, then continues to rob other banks, and the pressure is on to find the Expeditor (as the press refers to him).
But there is another subplot brewing. Hole seems to have had yet another alcoholic blackout when he was with a former flame. And the next day, that woman ends up dead. It looks like suicide and so it’s deemed by the police department. Hole is confused, then worried when anonymous emails start showing up in his inbox, implicating him in something a lot more dangerous than a hangover.
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