The Black Ice
Written by Richard Powers
Narrated by Dick Hill
4/5
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About this audiobook
When an LAPD narcotics officer is found with a fatal bullet wound and a suicide note, Detective Harry Bosch follows a bloody trail of drug murders across the Mexico border.
Working the case, LAPD detective Harry Bosch is reminded of the primal police rule he learned long ago: Don't look for the facts, but the glue that holds them together. Soon Harry's making some very dangerous connections, starting with a dead cop and leading to a bloody string of murders that wind from Hollywood Boulevard to the back alleys south of the border. Now this battle-scarred veteran will find himself in the center of a complex and deadly game-one in which he may be the next and likeliest victim.
Richard Powers
Richard Powers is the author of thirteen novels. His most recent, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Award, and he has been a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.
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Reviews for The Black Ice
1,785 ratings73 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Suspenseful. Harry Bosch is very purposeful in his investigation. He looks for the connecting threads that joined to caused this murder, though it may put a target on his back.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Good performance great story,no down time.hope next one on séries .
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
ANOTHER GREAT NOVEL BY MICHAEL CONNOLLY.GRIPPING AND EXCITING. I LOVE THE TWIST THAT HE MANAGES TO PRODUCE AT THE END. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crazy government scheme. Great read, ending was a little disappointing.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The mystery and the constant wonder of what happened to Cal and why would he hurt his brother.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not as engaging as the previous one, but still a pleasant book with well developed plot and interesting characters. It's definitely worth your time.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5All my concerns about the unnatural dialogue in Michael Connelly's first Harry Bosch novel, The Black Echo, are completely cleared up for his second outing. Bosch's supervisor, Pounds, has some sentences that could use some contractions to make them more natural, but he doesn't spend enough time talking for it to matter.Again, Connelly provides a twist in the end that I did not see coming, and the whole mystery was very well done. I'm looking forward to the rest of the series more now than I was after the first book.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Delicious.
Delightful.
Wild ride worth every hour.
Great story, well read!
Thank you. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Black Ice by Michael Connelly; (3 1/2*)This story is another well written tale. This one is about an investigation in Mexico against the drug lord who is making and distributing black ice, the newest drug craze in the U.S.This novel reads like classic noir & the reader can feel the low reverberating tones of a lonely sax in the 'City of Angels'.I am really getting attached to this Bosch character and am thrilled that I found this series buried in a box of books that my brother gave me & I stored in our shop. I will have to purchase the more recent two when I come to them.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I really enjoyed this book it had a great storyline. I love Harry Bosch, He is a great character. Looking forward to reading more of this series
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5One of the best Bocsh novels. This really should be one of the seasons for the television show.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Kept my interest, very entertaining and very fast pace. I recommend it.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Connelly at his best. Nothing better, except perhaps his latest novel with Bosch and Haller.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I started reading Bosch because I love the Amazon series. These books remind me of John Standford’s Davenport series-these are thicky, meaty mysteries that require some attention and time.Dirty cops, working both sides of the US/Mexico border, and an unsupportive command is all waiting for Bosch in this installment. I loved the layers and did not see the twist coming at the end. This is a fantastic mystery series to check out!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The second Harry Bosch book was a very good read. We learned a lot more about Harry's background which was very interesting. The book also had a great plot with lots of twists and turns and kept me interested until the very end. Looking forward to reading the next installment of the series.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Not as good as the other books in this series, the portion that takes place in Mexico is pretty far fetched. Still it was Bosch and it was entertaining.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5According to my GR records, I read this book back is 2017. And that it was the book that made me want to start and read the series from book one. I swear I do not remember a word of it. Anyway, good book, good story, good writing, good characters. An awful lot of dead people though.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is the second Bosch series book I've read and the second in the series and thankfully the first one I read was much better. Honestly, compared to The Black Echo - The Black Ice is not that good of a read ...
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Black Ice (1993), the second novel in Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch series, solidifies the image of Bosch that started to take form in the novel that introduced Bosch to the world a year earlier (The Black Echo). Harry Bosch, at this stage in his life, is a loner, a Vietnam War veteran who still carries the resulting emotional scars, and above all else, an honest cop who will always stand up for the little guy. Even the LAPD brass recognize that Harry Bosch is not someone who will worry about what they think of him. Rather, he will go where his investigatory instincts take him, no matter the risks to his own life or career aspirations.In The Black Ice, those instincts take him into Mexico - and he’s not coming back to Los Angeles until he is good and ready. It’s Christmas week, and even though Harry is the on-call detective, his phone doesn’t ring after another detective is discovered dead in a seedy LA motel room. Sensing that someone doesn’t want him to show up at the scene, Harry wastes no time getting there after being alerted to the crime by chatter on his police radio. There he learns that investigators are more than willing to call the cop’s death a suicide, and he is pretty much told to go away and mind his own business. But when another case that Harry is investigating starts to seem related to the cop’s death, Harry is reminded of a lesson he learned from his first partner when he was a just a rookie detective:“…facts weren’t the most important part of an investigation, the glue was. He (the partner) said the glue was made of instinct, imagination, and sometimes guesswork and most times just plain luck.”Harry is not one to count much on luck, but he has an abundance of instinct, imagination, and educated guesswork working in his favor. When, even after another cop is found dead, there are still a lot of people wanting to shut him down, Harry refuses to play their game. Now, if he can just avoid becoming the third dead cop in this case, Harry is going to separate the good guys from the bad guys once and for all. Bottom Line: The Black Ice is a well written and entertaining mystery, but it is also interesting for other reasons that Harry Bosch fans will appreciate. Along with further solidifying the Harry Bosch image as a crusader-cop, The Black Ice is also the novel in which Bosch learns his father’s identity. He learns, too, that he has a half-brother and three half-sisters when he spots them at their shared father’s funeral. That half-brother will, of course, turn out to be none other than Mickey Haller, who will go on eventually to earn his own Michael Connelly series as “The Lincoln Lawyer.”
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Moves along well. Clever ending
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I am sick of TV crime procedurals, but these Harry Bosch books take the same elements and put them together into a story I really enjoy reading. The methodical protagonist winks at old-fashioned hard-boiled detective stories without seeming like too much of a caricature.
This book offers the story of a detailed police investigation with a bit of personal drama thrown in. I really enjoyed the sections set in Calexico and Mexicali, towns that butt up against the border. The central mystery has enough clues and details to allow the reader to speculate in an enjoyable way, but doesn't offer quick definitive answers or make every problem have a completely obvious solution. By the end of the book the various elements of the plot come together very neatly in a way that doesn't feel cheap or coincidental.
Words I learned in this book:
quonset - a building made of corrugated metal and having a semicircular cross section.
chaparral - vegetation consisting chiefly of tangled shrubs and thorny bushes. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5My attempt at broadening my reading horizons by including more fictional genres in my TBR worked quite successfully with the first book in Michael Connelly’s Bosch series, The Black Echo, so I did not wait too long to move forward with this second novel: while it ultimately turned out to be an enjoyable experience, and it added some new layers to the main character, it did not have the same narrative drive as the first volume - probably a classic case of “second book syndrome”…Maverick detective Harry Bosch is spending his Christmas alone and on call for any homicide summons from his department, when he hears on the radio that the body of a colleague was found in a dingy motel, a possible suicide. It’s strange enough that he was not called to the scene, and it’s stranger still that the Assistant Chief of police seems bent on keeping him away from the investigation - when the next morning Bosch’s commander saddles him with a few open cases to be solved as quickly as possible, his suspicions escalate, and being like the proverbial dog with a bone he decides to take a closer look into the deceased cop’s death, particularly once he discovers that two of those pending cases foisted on him seem to be connected with it. A further compelling clue comes through a file that Cal Moore, the suicide, was compiling about the traffic of a new drug - the titular Black Ice - and that he had asked his former colleagues to forward the documentation to Bosch, as if he knew that he would not be able to complete it.As I said, the story is interesting enough, although not as gripping as the previous one, probably because I expected the same kind of sustained pacing that here was missing and picked up only toward the three quarter mark; this slower rhythm, however, is offset by a more concentrated focus on characterization and on some introspection that adds a few new layers to Bosch’s personality and sheds more light into his past. We learn further details about his childhood, for example, like the fact that he was orphaned at twelve and spent long years being shuttled from one foster family to another, which explains his solitary way of life: there is an interesting passage here where we see how he sort of bonds with a coyote prowling the wilderness near his house - recognizing a kind of affinity with the lonely animal, one that is later acknowledged by one of Bosch’s bosses who tells him that while he is enrolled in the police department he does not behave as if he were part of it, and that explains his often reckless disregard for the rules and the chain of command.While this side of Bosch’s character carries from the previous book, here one can also see a slight softening of his bluntness toward others, particularly when his investigation brings him across the border to Mexico and he discovers the similarities between his early life and that of his deceased colleague, whose death has by this time been ruled as homicide rather than suicide, prompting the detective to follow the trail of clues and bring justice to the victim - the main drive that powers his every action. This slow mellowing of Bosch’s rough edges is something I’m looking forward to in the course of the continuing series, because the theme of the “lone wolf” existing in an emotional vacuum would carry with difficulty through the next 20-odd books without becoming a cliché.Speaking of clichés, however, Bosch’s relationship with women seems to follow the guidelines of the noir genre, and where this might have been interesting enough in the previous book, where FBI agent Eleanor Wish was an intriguing foil (and as close as a femme fatale as her personality allowed) for the detective, here we see him entangled with no less than two women at the same time, and both of them look more like props than characters on their own right. I tried to keep in mind that the book was written 27 years ago and that a lot of proverbial water flowed under equally proverbial bridges, but Bosch’s treatment of both women skirts chauvinism in a very dangerous, very irritating way that grates even more than his endless smoking.This, together with a too-convoluted plot that at times did not roll forward very smoothly, and with an ending that was saddled with too much explanation, brought my rating down a notch: second books often being difficult beasts to tame, I’m ready to give this series some more time to see if it develops into the successful string of books that many are praising. The next one will probably offer a deciding factor…
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A good read. Plenty happening between LA and Mexico.
An interesting twist at the end. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The crime... if it even is one...is a puzzle that Harry Bosch intends to find the answer to...even it leads him to the police in Mexico, where it seems that he has worn out his welcome before he even arrives. The Mexican Police are not laying out the welcoming mat but they do content that it might be in their best interest to help him. The question that he carries with him is ..did narcotics officer Calexico Moore commit suicide? You'll have to read the book if you want the answer. I've read most of these books years ago but Harry Bosch is always a guy that is a real delight to re-visit anytime.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bosch is a fearless soul. Moving in the roughest circles of the Mexican border he solves a murder and a missing cops case because its right and the woman is out of a Phillip Marlowe case. Love LA, Bosch, and the writing that is a great reflection on Chandler.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The exceptional homicide investigator, Harry Bosch, once again colors outside the lines and does the things he needs to do to solve his cases while walking the tightrope of keeping the "suits" (police administrators) reasonably happy and occasionally satisfied.Harry is a thinking man's detective and not much gets by him, but as with any other human he is not infallible, so sometimes he is tricked, and sometimes he doesn't make connections on his cases as quickly as he would like. Nevertheless, he personifies perseverance and is honest in anything of consequence, the really important core values. The Black Ice investigation leads him across the border into Mexico where he skillfully assembles the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to solve his cases while also wading through the parallels he encounters with people having had a life as difficult or more difficult than his own.Connelly is a master weaver of a tale and he takes you on a journey of a realistic and enjoyable police procedural while delving into the complex dynamics of human emotions, experiences and behaviors. Connelly never disappoints. He is regularly a "2 a.m." read, at least for me - hard to put down and always worth the effort!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Liked this one much better than the first one. (Could just be my state of mind while reading either one of them.) But there was one thing that I REALLY liked better about this one ... shorter chapters! Sounds silly, but I like to stop reading at the end of a chapter, but if it takes an hour or so to read a chapter, that isn't always very feasible. In any event, the plot was solid as were the characters. Just a good solid entertaining read!
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Harry Bosch navigates his way through three murders and the limits placed upon him by his department to find the connections to the drug black ice and the paired border towns Calexico and Mexicali. Dealing with the past and its injustices is a theme as is loneliness and living within organizations, but I still haven't much of a feel for Bosch's character yet. The story and the settings are very interesting in a dark way and the pacing is excellent.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Black Ice
4 Stars
When the apparent suicide of narcotics officer, Cal Moore, is linked to two of his unsolved homicide cases, Detective Harry Bosch’s investigation leads him on a dark and twisted path that places him, not only in the middle of a complex web of lies and deceit, but within the crosshairs of one of Mexico’s most notorious drug kingpins. With numerous players intent on hindering his progress, Harry’s stalwart determination might get him through or it might get him killed.
Drug dealers and corrupt cops are not particularly appealing themes. Nevertheless, the mystery is well-developed with several compelling twists and turns, although the final revelation is rather predictable as corpses without faces always raise suspicions concerning identity. Moreover, there is an appropriate sense of poetic justice in the climax and resolution.
The characterization is one of the highlights of the book. The details of Harry’s past enhance the complexity of his character and the juxtaposition with Cal Moore’s upbringing adds nuance to both their actions and motivations.
My one issue with the book is the writing. As in the first book, there are overly descriptive sections particularly during the action scenes toward the end, which cause the story to drag a little. Hopefully, this will improve in later installments.
In sum, The Black Ice is an edgy police procedural with an enigmatic hero whose appeal only increases from book to book. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The was a quick read and I did enjoy the conclusion of this one. I am already somewhat tired of the IA out to get Harry portion of the story and hope that this is not so much front and center in future books.
3.5 stars for a good ending.