Nine dragons

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nine Dragons (original title: Nine Dragons ) is the 21st novel by the American crime novelist Michael Connelly and the 14th novel in the Harry Bosch series. It was published in 2009 (in German 2011).

action

On September 8, 2009, Bosch and his partner Ferras were sent to the Liqour Store by John Li, who was shot there. Harry Bosch remembers John Li, whose business was ransacked during the 1999 riots. Bosch notices that the current CD for Li’s monitoring system is missing. But on older recordings, Bosch notes that Li paid protection money to Bo-Jing Chang, a collector of the Chinese tirades . Bosch turns on the detective of the Asian Gang Unit, David Chu. They arrest Chang when he is trying to leave the country.

Chang makes no statement. Bosch arranges that Chang must remain in temporary detention over the weekend. Harry Bosch is threatened in a phone call about the arrest of Chang and receives a short video on his cell phone showing his daughter Madeline: she was kidnapped in Hong Kong. Bosch flies to Hong Kong. His ex-wife Eleanor Wish, who lives there with Maddie, is supposed to get him a gun and help free Maddie. On the morning of September 13th, Bosch arrives in Hong Kong. Eleanor Wish picks him up at the airport with her partner Sun Yee.

On the video with his daughter, Bosch could make out some features of the environment. Together with Elanor Wish, he finds out that his daughter is probably being held in the Chungking Mansions in Kowloon . To gain access to the building, Bosch is careless enough to show a lot of bills. Two robbers attack Bosch and Wish after searching the room in question without finding Maddie. The robbers shoot Eleanor Wish before Bosch can kill her.

Bosch forces the receptionist to give him the address of the tenant of the apartment. The records show that Peng Qingcai, who gained Maddie's trust, rented the room. Sun Yee and Harry Bosch drive to Qingcai's apartment, where they find Peng, his sister, and his mother murdered. You can find the memory chip on Maddie's cell phone.

The memory contains a number that Bosch assigns to the triads. You call the number and request a meeting "because of a problem with the girl". At the agreed meeting point, Bosch identifies a woman with a boy who is answering Sun Yee's phone calls. Yee and Bosch follow them and eventually rescue Ho Maddie from the trunk of a car at the pier after a fight on the organ dealer’s boat. Bosch suspects that Maddie should be brought to China as part of an organ trade. Sun Yee drives Bosch and his daughter to the airport, where they take the next plane to Los Angeles.

A few days later, two officers from the Hong Kong Police Force's Triad Bureau arrive in Los Angeles. They want to question him and blame him for the many dead in Hong Kong. Bosch contacts his half-brother Mickey Haller, who is supposed to represent him as legal advisor. Haller threatens Hong Kong officials that he will turn on the press because Hong Kong police refused to look for Maddie when Eleanor Wish reported her missing. The Hong Kong investigators are satisfied that Bosch describes the events. He leaves out anything that could bother him or Sun Yee.

During the interrogation, Bosch received a call from investigator Teri Sopp, who tried to use a new method to find a fingerprint on the shell that was seized from John Li's shop. Sopp found a print and found a hit in a database: not the Chinese Chang, as Bosch thought, but a scriptwriter named Henry Lau.

Henry Lau has an alibi. However, it turns out that he had attended the University of Southern California (USC) with John Li's son Robert and his friend Eugene Lam . The three played poker regularly, and both Robert Li and Eugene Lam had access to the weapon.

Bosch arrests Eugene Lam. Bosch succeeds in getting Lam to confess. Eugene Lam shot John Li. He was instigated by Robert Li, the son, and his sister Mia. Lam also admits that he made the threatening phone call to Bosch to cast suspicion on the triads. When Bosch and Chu want to arrest Robert and Mia Li, they learn that Bosch's partner Ignacio Ferras is already on the way to see the Lis. When Ferras tries to arrest Li, he is shot by his sister Mia. Mia Li wanted Eugene Lam to kill not only her father, but also her mother because she had been abused by her parents as a cheap housemaid for years. After the Ferras murder, Mia Li shoots herself.

Bosch and his daughter attend Ferras and Wish funerals the following week. Then his daughter confesses to him what he already suspected, namely that she and Peng Qingcai had faked her kidnapping in order to get Bosch to bring her from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. However, Peng betrayed them and sold them to the organ dealer Ho, who then killed Peng and his family. Bo-Jing Chang was not involved in the kidnapping of Maddie or the murder of John Li.

Remarks

  1. ↑ Kowloon means nine dragons , hence the title of the novel.

Cross references

In Black Angels (chapter 39) the owner of Fortune Liquors gives Harry Bosch a matchbook with a motto: Happy is the man who finds refuge in himself . As Harry Bosch enters the crime scene, he takes this matchbook out of his jacket pocket. Only one match is missing; Bosch kept the booklet all the time.

When Mickey Haller threatened Hong Kong investigators with the press, he named reporter Jack McEvoy as his partner at the Los Angeles Times , even though he was no longer working for the newspaper at the time. Jack McEvoy is the main character in Michael Connelly's novels The Poet and His Last Mission .

reception

Publishers Weekly finds that Bosch, persistent as always, is particularly compelling in the role of protective father. Paula L. Woods, herself a crime writer, points out in the Los Angeles Times that the book is not only charged with tension, as is usual from Connelly, but in particular that “the overwhelming vulnerability that he feels as a father makes the“ Nine Dragons ”one makes another outstanding title in the series that should satisfy all readers, whether they are new to the Bosch world, casual visitors or devoted residents. ”The reviewer of the New York Times sees this book by Connelly very differently , she judges it as "disappointingly flat" and the plot as "gimmicky".

The Krimicouch also takes a critical view of the novel: the biggest drawback is that the plot of the actual criminal case, which starts out interestingly, is frayed by randomly introduced new people.

expenditure

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Publishers Weekly: Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly
  2. ↑ Paula L. Woods: 'Nine Dragons' by Michael Connelly in: LA Times, October 12, 2009
  3. ↑ Janet Maslin: Cold-Case Trial: Two Opposites on Same Side, Facing Down a Killer in: New York Times, October 6, 2010
  4. ↑ Jürgen Priester: A Harry Bosch Special Crime Couch.de, October 2010