The Black Echo (Harry Bosch, #1; Harry Bosch Universe, #1)

by Michael Connelly

“You think you know me from some papers in a file? You don’t know me. Tell me what you know.” “I don’t know you. I know about you,” she said. She stopped a moment to gather her thoughts. “You are an institutional man, Detective Bosch. Your whole life. Youth shelters, foster homes, the army, then the police. Never leave the system. One flawed societal institution after another.”

“Hollywood,” he said. “Is Rourke always such a stiff?” She turned east and smiled one of those smiles that made Bosch wonder whether she and Rourke had something going on. “When he wants,” she said. “He’s a good administrator, though. He runs the squad well. Always has been the leader type, I guess. I think he said he was in charge of a whole outfit or something when he was with the army. Over there in Saigon.” No way there was anything between them, he thought then. You don’t defend your lover by calling him a good administrator. There was nothing there.

he found a framed print of Hopper’s Nighthawks. It was the piece he had seen above her couch that first night he was with her. Bosch hung the print in the hallway near his front door, and from time to time he would stop and study it when he came in, particularly from a weary day or night on the job. The painting never failed to fascinate him, or to evoke memories of Eleanor Wish. The darkness. The stark loneliness. The man sitting alone, his face turned to the shadows. I am that man, Harry Bosch would think each time he looked.