A Darkness More Than Night

LAPD detective Harry Bosch, star of Angels Flight, crosses paths with Blood Work's Terry McCaleb in Michael Connelly's most tension-charged novel ever.

Harry Bosch is up to his neck in a case that has transfixed all of celebrity-mad Los Angeles: a movie director charged with murdering an actress during sex, and then staging her death to make it look like a suicide. Bosch is both the arresting officer and the star witness in a trial that has brought the Hollywood media pack out in full-throated frenzy.

Terry McCaleb is enjoying an idyllic retirement on Catalina Island when a visit from an old colleague brings his former world rushing back. It's a murder, the unreadable kind of murder he specialized in solving back in his FBI days. The investigation has stalled, and the sheriff's office is asking McCaleb to take a quick look at the murder book to see if he turns up something they've missed.

McCaleb's first reading of the crime scene leads him to look for a methodical killer with a taste for rituals and revenge. As his quick look accelerates into a full-sprint investigation, the two crimes — his murdered loner and Bosch's movie director — begin to overlap strangely. With one unsettling revelation after another, they merge, becoming one impossible, terrifying case, involving almost inconceivable calculation. McCaleb believes he has unmasked the most frightening killer ever to cross his sights. But his investigation tangles with Bosch's lines, and the two men find themselves at odds in the most dangerous investigation of their lives.

A Darkness More Than Night explores the darkest precincts of Los Angeles and the hidden corners of the human heart. It is Michael Connelly's most brilliantly plotted novel ever, a riveting courtroom spectacle woven together with a nerve-racking investigation. This is a new masterpiece of crime fiction by the writer USA Today has hailed as "one of those masters...who can keep driving the story forward in runaway locomotive style."

"[Y]ou can't lose with this chilling tour-de-force." Kirkus Reviews

"[F]lawless, cleverly conceived, superbly plotted and morally complex." Publishers Weekly

"One of the best of the new breed of thriller writers." San Francisco Examiner

"Conelly is one of those masters...who can keep driving the story forward in runaway locomotive style." USA Today

"Michael Connelly recalls no one so much as Raymond Chandler...ambitious, skillful, moving, intricate, and clever." Los Angeles Times

"Connelly at his best." Library Journal

"Lean and mean....McCaleb and Bosch make a formidable team." Sunday Chicago Tribune

"Connelly is raising the hard-boiled detective novel to a new level...adding substance and depth to modern crime fiction." Boston Globe

"[T]his great thriller will keep you busy...Connelly is the best of a very large group...of thriller writers..." Rocky Mountain News

"...Connelly's mysteries exude the grit of their settings, but their real standout element is the haunted nature of the heroes..." Denver Post

When the LAPD asks criminal profiler Terrence McCaleb to help investigate a series of ritualized murders, he is reluctantly drawn away from his peaceful new life back into the horror of tracking a homicidal maniac. More horrifying, though, is that the suspect who seems to fit the profile that McCaleb develops is someone he knows and has worked with in the past--Detective Harry Bosch.

Retired FBI agent Terrence McCaleb is asked by the LAPD to help them investigate a series of murders that have them baffled. They are the kind of ritualized killings that McCaleb specialized in solving with the FBI; and he is reluctantly drawn from his peaceful new life back into the horror and excitement of tracking down a terrifying homicidal maniac. More horrifying still, the suspect who seems to fit the profile that McCaleb develops is someone he has known and worked with in the past: LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch...

Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.

After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986 he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors that was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.

After three years on the crime beat, Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published in 1992 and later won the Edgar Award for best first novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Connelly followed up with three more Bosch books before publishing The Poet, a thriller with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist, in 1996. In 1997 he went back to Bosch with Trunk Music and in 1998 another non-series thriller, Blood Work, was published. Blood Work was inspired in part by a friends receiving of a heart transplant and the attendant survivors guilt the friend experienced, knowing that someone died in order that he have the chance to live. Connelly had been interested and fascinated by those same feelings as expressed by the survivors of the plane crash he wrote about years before. With his friend acting as both technical and emotional advisor, Connelly wrote the book about a former FBI agent with a heart transplant who gets caught up in a web of murder. Connelly's books have won the Edgar, Anthony, Nero, Maltese Falcon (Japan) and .38 caliber (France) awards. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.