By Jeffery Fleishman
FROM: Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles is a madman’s prayer wrapped inside a murderous dream.

It’s homeless on sidewalks and hustlers in the hills. It’s laborers and housekeepers, and billboards of lust, dystopia, apes, robots, Chewbaccas, Kim and Kanye, and Lady Gaga’s newest thing. It’s clear skies, no mosquitoes and laser-sculpted people with money, hedgerows and sins. A crime writer can make of it what he or she wants, like “Westworld” or a lover who gives you a kiss and a key, and one day changes the locks.

The city is the seething, sexy capital of noir. It is an illicit urge — a trick of possibility — slinking like a con man’s ruse into a novelist’s imagination. Transgressions pile up and the skyline is newly pricked, rising above vintage bungalows that sell for a million-plus and are gutted and remade for the conceits and dark angels of a new century.

Raymond Chandler knew Los Angeles was both lie and delusion. A bitter candyland, where paradise betrays, and men talk tough and women know the score. The city is desire and the demons beneath, a metropolis where virtue is transactional and shifting façades, like so many Hollywood sets, mask cruelty and indifference. Not forever but long enough to make one wonder whether Michael Connelly’s reticent and resilient Det. Harry Bosch will in the end find peace in his creed: “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

“Telling something new about this place is what defines a great L.A. crime novel,” said Connelly, whose new book, “The Night Fire,” which pairs Bosch with Det. Renee Ballard, will be published Tuesday. “Not imitating what has been done in the past but taking those influences and inspirations, putting it in a blender with your own experiences and ideas, mixing on purée and pouring out something unique about this unique place.” Read Rest of Article Here