Final Warning (Connelly)

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Last warning (English: Lost Light) is the 13th novel by the American crime novelist Michael Connelly , the 9th novel in the Harry Bosch series. The original was published in 2003 and 2005 in the German translation by Sepp Leeb by Heyne Verlag. The novel received the Maltese Falcon Award in 2006 .

action

Harry Bosch has resigned from the LAPD. But he took away the files of open cases that always preoccupied him. Including the 1999 murder of Angella Benton. Lawton Cross, a police officer who was investigating the case but was later bedridden by a gunshot, brings the case back to Bosch. As Bosch begins his private investigation, Kiz Rider, his former partner, apparently visits him with an assignment to dissuade Bosch from the investigation.

The case has a number of very strange coincidences: shortly after the murder of Angella Benton, 2 million dollars were stolen in broad daylight at the location of the film studio where she worked. The two cops from the LAPD investigating the robbery were the victim of a robbery in a pub, one, Jack Dorsey being shot, the other, Lawton Cross, paraplegic. The FBI agent Martha Gessler discovered that one of the numbers on the stolen banknotes was also on a banknote that had long since been confiscated. Shortly afterwards Martha Gessler disappeared without a trace. Later, one of the banknotes from the robbery on location turned up at a potential terrorist.

Despite the warnings from Kiz Rider, Bosch does not allow himself to be dissuaded from the investigation, especially not when he receives information about Martha Gessler from her colleague and friend Roy Lindell. When he researched a public library on the Internet and found the name of a suspected terrorist named Mousouwa Aziz in press reports, Bosch noticed that he was probably being followed. Indeed, when he visits Lawton Cross again, he is arrested and taken to a cell in a secret prison on the 9th floor of the FBI headquarters in Los Angeles, where he spends the night. On the way to the cell he sees Aziz in another cell. The next day, FBI agent John Peoples threatens him with secret detention if he doesn't stop his investigation.

To evade FBI surveillance, Bosch flies to Las Vegas and gives his ex-wife Eleanor Wish his credit cards, which she is supposed to use to spend money in Las Vegas, while Bosch drives back to Los Angeles in a rental car.

Harry Bosch had a security camera installed in Lawton Cross' room and has a recording showing FBI agent Milton abusing the paraplegic. With this recording, he forces Peoples to hand over all the documents relating to the murder of Angella Benton. Milton breaks into Bosch's attorney Janis Langwiser to steal the recording, which Bosch also films. Only then does People give in and hand over the documents to Bosch, assuring him not to prevent him from continuing his investigation.

Bosch follows the trail of the money and finds out that a bank employee, Linus Simonson, who was the head of the robber, murdered Angella Benton and manipulated the banknote numbers. It turns out that Simonson, along with three partners, now owned four expensive nightclubs in Los Angeles. Bosch visits the establishments and confronts Simonson with his suspicions. After that, he drives home and finds that he is being followed as expected.

FBI agent Milton is already lying in wait for him in the house. Shortly afterwards, the four nightclub owners break into the house and shoot Milton, whom they believe to be Bosch. In a grueling battle, Bosch can kill three of the intruders and incapacitate the fourth. When the police and the FBI arrive, Bosch agrees to make a statement to Kiz Rider and Roy Lindell without a lawyer.

While reconstructing what happened during the interrogation, Rider points out that the disappearance of Martha Gessler did not fit in with the money robbers' modus operandi. Bosch now realizes the real connections: the two police officers Dorsey and Cross blackmailed the robbers and they killed Martha Gessler because she got on their trail. The blackmail of the robbers did not work: Dorsey and Cross became victims of the robbers.

Bosch urges Lawton Cross to tell him the place where they buried Martha Gessler's body: in a cave in Griffith Park . Bosch digs up the body with Roy Lindell.

After it's all over, Bosch flies to Las Vegas and drives to Eleanor Wish's house. He was a little jealous of his ex-wife because she used to talk about "we". Now it turns out that the "we" referred to Eleanor having a little daughter: Bosch's daughter Madeline.

Cross references

Roy Lindell, the FBI agent who would like Harry Bosch to find out what happened to Martha Gessler, also appears in The Comeback and Black Angels . In Das Comeback, Bosch initially considers Lindell to be a mobster until he learns that Roy Lindell is working as an undercover agent.

Janis Langwiser, who keeps the videos showing the attacks by the FBI people, was a former public prosecutor and supported Bosch in Black Angels in 1999 . In 2001 she interviewed Bosch in the trial of David Storey in Darker Than the Night . She later left the prosecution and became an attorney with a "small but influential" law firm.

In Chapter 27, Bosch comes across a yellow Corvette driven by a private investigator he knows who lives near his home on Woodrow Wilson Drive. He nods to him. It's Elvis Cole, a character from the books of Robert Crais , a friend of Connelly. Bosch and Cole had also met in the novel "Last Detective" (2003) by Robert Crais (in chapter 9). In this book, Crais describes a shared past Bosch and Cole had in Vietnam.

background

Connelly wrote 'Last Warning' after September 11th and addresses how government agencies are violating more and more fundamental rights and the privacy of citizens. Michael Drewniok formulates Connelly's message in this novel in the Krimicouch : “The real danger in this world does not come from crazy and ingenious serial killers, but from blinded fanatics, unscrupulous fundamentalists and faceless 'elites' who are exclusively concerned with money and power goes. Connelly formulates 'Last Warning' as a stage on America's path to becoming a police state, whose leadership (this word is used with caution here) keeps its citizens underage 'for their own good' and treats them as useful idiots and exploits them. "

reception

Kirkus Review places the novel in a row with Chandler's 'The Long Farewell' and attests to the novel a certain originality: Connelly was not satisfied with repeating his earlier successes. Publishers Weekly sees the fun of reading in the way Harry Bosch untangles the various twists and turns of the plot and ultimately dissolves them. In addition to the reference to the background of the novel, the Krimicouch praises the skillful plot, the exciting writing style and considers the book to be a “must for friends of the really good cop thriller”.

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Michael Drewniok: Harry Bosch in the spider web of the anti-terror mafia crime thriller couch.de, July 2005
  2. ↑ Kirkus Review: Lost Light by Michael Connelly
  3. ^ Publishers Weekly: Lost Light