Nightshade: A Bold Start to a New Connelly Series
A cop on a coastal island needs to investigate the remains of a woman found in the ocean, but the mayor reminds him it’s tourist season and the bad publicity could hurt local businesses.
The opening of Peter Benchley’s Jaws?
Not this time. It’s the early chapters of Nightshade, Michael Connelly’s latest novel. While the early chapters have a Benchleyan feel to them, this novel is pure Connelly, if you can have a pure Connelly novel without Bosch or Haller. In fact, there’s not even a passing reference to characters or events from Connelly’s previous works. But the novel offers these elements: deep and detailed knowledge of the justice system; a setting in greater Los Angeles; a cop on the outs with his superiors who is obsessed with finding justice for a murder victim.
Sound familiar?
The cop in this case is Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Detective Stilwell, known to his friends as Stil. (Like Colin Dexter’s Morse, we don’t learn his first name.) Having run afoul of the powers-that-be, Stilwell has been banished from the main homicide desk to Catalina Island. As Connelly fans will remember from Blood Work and A Darkness More than Light, Catalina is a sleepy haven for sailors and fishermen about 22 miles offshore from Los Angeles.
In this policeman’s Purgatory, Stilwell oversees a team battling petty crimes and misdemeanors. The meanest crime on Stilwell’s docket is looking into the decapitation of a buffalo at a wildlife park. Then a young woman’s body is found wrapped in a canvas bag and weighted down in the harbor. She’s soon identified as Leigh-Anne Moss, a waitress at the ritzy Black Marlin Club who was despised by her managers for coming on to the members. The investigation of this murder officially belongs to the Sheriff’s homicide department – the same folks who had banished Stilwell to Catalina. He does not trust them to investigate the case properly and bring the killer to justice, so he crosses all kinds of jurisdictional lines to ensure justice for Moss.
Nightshade is a really good novel, just not as great as some of Connelly’s earlier works. Just as bucolic Catalina can’t rival Los Angeles for gritty excitement and danger, Stilwell seems a paler version of Bosch. He’s as honest, forthright and obsessive in pursuit of a criminal. This obsession becomes his most human failing as he jeopardizes his relationship with his girlfriend due to his relentless pursuit of the killer. But he doesn’t have Bosch’s edge. You can’t picture him sucker-punching a henchman at a Vegas strip joint, like Bosch did in Trunk Music. I should add there are some great secondary characters in Nightshade, including Leigh-Anne Moss, a narcissistic gold-digger, and her wealthy lover.
In one or two chapters in Nightshade, it feels like Connelly is coasting. The example that springs to mind is an abduction scene. Without giving too much away, let’s just say Stilwell resolves the situation within the space of one chapter. No twists. No surprises. I couldn’t help but compare it to the scene in Trunk Music in which Eleanor Wish was abducted by the two Samoans. Bosch had to pressure a mobster he’d busted to reveal where Eleanor was being held. Then he brought in Jerry Edgar and together they devised a way to get Eleanor out alive. It was so much more complex, clever and memorable than the similar scene in Nightshade.
All of which is not to say that Connelly has lost his ability to craft a ripping yarn. Far from it. He has structured the book beautifully, drawing the reader into Stilwell’s investigation of the Moss murder. In classic Connelly form, you’re carried along by the mystery, by the sympathetic characters, and by the author’s peerless knowledge of cops and the justice system.
But there’s something more. For the past decade or so, the Bosch and Ballard novels have featured at least two plotlines, and I’ve found Connelly can be jarring in weaving back and forth between the stories. In Nightshade, Connelly holds the reader’s interest by concentrating on the investigation of the Moss murder, garnishing this main course with a few sub-plots. Three-quarters of the way through the novel, the sub-plot around the butchered buffalo rears its severed head and becomes one of the main plotlines driving the story. But by this time, we’re hooked on the whole story and won’t let go. Connelly blends these two plotlines into a single page-turning story because we want to follow Stilwell.
With a bit of luck, we’ll be following Stilwell for a while yet. Connelly has spoken about spinning this into a new series, which would be great – nay, fantastic – news for his legion of fans. By placing his new hero in the LA County Sheriff’s Department rather than the LAPD, Connelly has made a fresh start without Bosch or his backstory. Readers will be lucky if he builds on this auspicious start.
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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.
