Angels Flight: Great Thriller, Impactful Social Analysis
SPOILER ALERT: This column reveals a few key plot twists in Angels Flight. Its target audience is people who have already read the book.
When Michael Connelly began to work on his Harry Bosch series in the late 1980s, Rodney King was unheard of, O.J. Simpson was known as an ex-football player, and there was little controversy surrounding the Los Angeles Police Department.
Within a few years, all that had changed. The acquittal of the LAPD officers who had beaten King led to three days of rioting in 1992. The arrest and trial of Simpson exposed shortcomings in the entire justice system. And the commission headed by Warren Christopher highlighted the systemic racism within the LA police force.
It wasn’t until 1999, when he published Angels Flight, that Connelly really tackled the subject of racism and police brutality within the LAPD head-on. He’d touched on it previously, in the trial in Concrete Blonde or in the bigotry of disgruntled beat cop Ray Powers in Trunk Music. But in Angels Flight, the sixth Bosch novel, Connelly wove this controversy right into the fabric of the story, and the result is an explosive police procedural that’s difficult to put down and an insightful social commentary.
The novel begins as a classic whodunnit, with the body of Black civil rights lawyer Howard Elias being found in a funicular railway car at Angels Flight in downtown Los Angeles. A second victim, Catalina Perez, appears to have been an innocent bystander who was murdered because she had witnessed the Elias killing. Famous for suing the Los Angeles Police Department, Elias had been preparing for a high-profile case against the department to begin a few days later. He was to represent an African-American client, Michael Harris, who claimed LAPD detectives had tortured him during a ruthless interrogation, leaving him partially deaf.
It looks like a cop has killed Elias, who was despised by the officers he had humiliated in court. The LAPD brass is in a quandary: the city could explode into new riots if a cop isn’t tried and convicted for the killing, but they don’t know for sure that the killer wears a badge. Deputy Chief Irvin Irving solves the problem by ordering Detective Harry Bosch to head a team to investigate the killing of Howard Elias.
The racial tensions that had been simmering in Los Angeles throughout the 1990s boil over in Angels Flight. Like Dennis Lehane, Connelly demonstrates that a crime novel can be an effective vehicle for analyzing race relations. But confronting this issue couldn’t have been easy for Connelly. Though he’d always written about corruption atop the LAPD, Connelly’s hero and supporting characters are all cops dedicated to doing their jobs well. They would have lost all sympathy with the readers if he now portrayed them as racists. But the evidence was overwhelming that the LAPD suffered from racism from top to bottom and throughout much of the rank and file. Connelly had to portray it while remaining true to his hero’s ethics.
Scene after scene in this novel brings out different aspects of race relations in Los Angeles. Bosch and another officer have to tell Elias’ widow and son of the lawyer’s death, and they immediately say Elias must have been assassinated by a cop. When Irving (whose race is never identified in the Bosch books, but we assume he is white) holds a press conference, he wants African-American officers Kizmin Rider and Jerry Edgar at his side to show there are Black investigators on the Elias case.
The deepest analysis of the racial divide in Los Angeles comes when Bosch discusses the matter with Carla Entrenkin, a civil rights lawyer who serves as the LAPD Inspector General. The civilian watchdog begins the novel as Bosch’s adversary but they overcome their differences and try to understand the other’s perspective. She never buys Bosch’s view that the media (especially television) exacerbates racial tensions. And when Bosch refers to rioting, she says she prefers the term civil unrest.
“Civil unrest occurs when the feelings of overwhelming powerlessness hit critical mass,” she says. “It has nothing to do with television. It has to do with society not addressing the essential needs of overlooked people.”
While diving into the prejudices that are a stain on the city, Connelly also brings out his love of Los Angeles through his description of a few of its great landmarks. First there’s Angels Flight itself, which has since become a bit of a shrine for Bosch fans, having been featured prominently in Season 4 of the Bosch TV series. But more importantly, Connelly writes beautiful descriptions of the Bradbury Building, even researching the story of the building’s architect.
One fascinating aspect of this novel is its structure. Two-thirds through the book, Bosch surrenders the Elias investigation to the FBI, letting his friend Field Officer Roy Lindell (who readers met in Trunk Music) handle the case. Bosch decides his team will investigate the case of Stacy Kincaid, a young girl whose kidnapping and murder were the genesis of the whole story.
When Stacy was taken from her bedroom in her family’s palatial mansion two years earlier, the police had searched her bedroom and found the fingerprints of ex-con Michael Harris. Led by Bosch’s former partner Frankie Sheehan, a group of detectives brutally interrogated Harris, determined to learn where the girl was and whether she was still alive. After the girl’s body was found in a dumpster, the cops unsuccessfully prosecuted Harris, who later sued them claiming they tortured him by sticking a sharpened pencil into his ear.
You may expect this diversion from the main story would diffuse the tension in the plot, but it actually supercharges the story. The reader wants to know what happened to this little girl, and it provides a wonderful storyline with a great twist. It enriches the whole novel because it sheds further light on the book’s central theme: relations between the LAPD and the city’s Black community.
Not only was Harris innocent in the Kincaid killing, but he was indeed tortured by none other than Bosch’s dear friend Frankie Sheehan. Connelly – sometimes criticized online for portraying his white heroes as just a bit too heroic, especially when they’re cops – actually structures a plot showing that the LAPD’s harshest critics are actually right. Yet the author does it in such a way that the reader is sympathetic to Sheehan – he’s a decent man who snapped under the pressure of the job and was filled with remorse.
In fact, there are four central crimes in this book and the perpetrators in each are white people in positions of power, including cops. Stacy Kincaid was not killed by a Black ex-con. A police officer did indeed torture Michael Harris. And Howard Elias and Catalina Perez were murdered by a police officer – just not the officer we would expect.
The climax of this book is indeed climactic, a great riotous outpouring of retribution by the “overlooked people” Entrenkin had highlighted. In total, Angels Flight is a highly entertaining novel that was written when Connelly was at the top of his game. As a social commentary, it’s his most important book and irreplaceable in Michael Connelly’s multi-volume examination of the Los Angeles police force.
* * *
Peter Moreira is the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Go to the home page of this website to sign up for a free prequel.
