PattyMacDotComma's Reviews > The Narrows

4★
“All they did was trade one monster for another. Instead of a dragon they now have a snake. A giant snake that sleeps in the narrows and bides its time until the moment is right and it can open its jaws and swallow someone down.
-John Kinsey, father of a boy lost in the narrows, Los Angeles Times, July 21, 1956

To contain the floodwaters of the Los Angeles River (the monster), part of the river ‘bed’ is now enormous, deep, concrete culverts. (If you’ve seen the movie “Grease” or “Terminator 2”, you’ve seen the empty riverbed.)

“‘My mother had taught me early and often, when it rains... “Stay out of the narrows.”

‘What?’ Rachel whispered.

‘I was thinking about the river. Trapped between those walls. When I was a kid we called it “the narrows.” When it rains like this the water moves fast. It’s deadly.’

‘But we’re going to the house.’

‘Same thing, Rachel. Be careful. Stay out of the narrows.’”

Harry Bosch picks up this story where The Poet left off. It featured reporter Jack McEvoy, not Bosch. This also follows the story of Terry McCaleb in A Darkness More Than Night.

He was a retired FBI agent with a heart transplant and a young family who lived on Catalina Island, off the coast of California. McCaleb ran a fishing charter with a business partner, Buddy.

[Incidentally, Connelly uses both first and last names when referring to characters, and there is probably a pattern to it, but I find I use them interchangeably, which I realise may be confusing in reviews. Sorry if it is.]

McCaleb died suddenly from heart failure, but his wife, Graciela, thinks there was more to it than that, so she contacts Bosch. McCaleb and Bosch had worked cases together, and had saved each other’s lives, and although Bosch is retired from the LAPD, he still has contacts and a private detective’s licence.

“‘He told me there were things about you he didn’t like and that he didn’t agree with. I think he meant the way you do things. But he said at the end of the day, after all the cops and agents he had known and worked with, if he had to pick somebody to work a murder case with, that it would be you. Hands down. He said he would pick you because you wouldn’t give up.’

McCaleb had become so obsessed with old cases that he was often living on his boat, going through boxes of files. He’d become famous when his last case was featured in a movie, so he’d acquired both fans and enemies. Graciela had reason for her suspicions.

Meanwhile, the FBI has called FBI agent Rachel Walling, who was hunting "the Poet" in the book of that name, and who, as a result of an affair, has been banished to the wilderness for several years with postings in the Dakotas, North and South. They have received a package for her.

“ ‘It was addressed to you. At Behavioral Sciences. The mail room brought it down to us and we had it X-rayed and then we opened it. Carefully.’

‘What was in it?’

‘A GPS reader.’
. . .
‘It had one waypoint in its record. The Mojave. Just inside the California border at Nevada. We flew out yesterday and we went to the marker. We’ve been using thermal imaging and gas probes. Late yesterday we found the first body, Rachel.’

‘Who is it?’

‘We don’t know yet. It’s old. It had been there a long time. We’re just starting with it. The excavation work is slow.’

‘You said the “first” body. How many more are there?’

‘As of when I left the scene last we were up to four. We think there’s more.’

‘Cause of death?’

‘Too early.’”

. . .
‘He named this point Hello, Rachel’”

While Bosch is poring over files, Buddy complains that he thinks another fishing guide stole the GPS off their boat. He’d won it in a game of poker and put waypoints on for their good fishing spots.

Bosch and Rachel are in two separate stories, but the pieces are falling together nicely for the reader. Bosch’s ex-wife (and little daughter) live in Las Vegas, where Eleanor makes a good living as a top poker player. She is also an ex-FBI profiler and Bosch tries to get to Nevada often to visit.

The desert makes a good backdrop for this thriller. Chapters move from one viewpoint to another. Harry narrates much of his part in the first person, and so does the villain sometimes, but Rachel and the others are told in the third person.

I enjoy watching Harry’s gears turn, piecing clues together. We may already know something he doesn’t yet, and it’s interesting seeing how Connelly gets him there.

On the other hand, it is truly unsettling and creepy to be in the head, even briefly, of an unusually clever, sickening, evil killer like the Poet. It makes it even harder knowing Harry will keep putting himself in harm’s way, because he can’t not.

“I knew that my life’s mission would always take me to the places where evil waits, to the places where the truth that I might find would be an ugly and horrible thing. And still I went without pause. And still I went, not being ready for the moment when evil would come from its waiting place. When it would grab at me like an animal and take me down into the black water.”

I’m not fond of the sadistic nature of the crimes Harry investigates, but I like seeing him figure things out. Another good story to add to the list.

(#1) My review of The Black Echo

(#2) My review of The Black Ice


(#3) My review of The Concrete Blonde

(#4) My review of The Last Coyote

(#5) My review of Trunk Music

(#6) My review of Angels Flight

(#7) My review of A Darkness More Than Night

(#8) My review of City of Bones

(#9) My review of Lost Light

(#10) (Jack McEvoy #1, Harry Bosch Universe #5, prequel to The Narrows) My review of The Poet