The Black Echo: Harry Bosch Series, Book 1

By: Michael Connelly

Narrated by: Dick Hill

Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

An LAPD homicide detective must choose between justice and vengeance as he teams up with the FBI in the first novel of the "thrilling" Harry Bosch series (New York Times Book Review).

For maverick LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch, the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal...because the murdered man was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who had fought side by side with him in a hellish underground war. Now Bosch is about to relive the horror of Nam. From a dangerous maze of blind alleys to a daring criminal heist beneath the city, his survival instincts will once again be tested to their limit. Pitted against enemies inside his own department and forced to make the agonizing choice between justice and vengeance, Bosch goes on the hunt for a killer whose true face will shock him.

Impressed? Ace detective Harry Bosch is also on the case in other exciting Michael Connelly crime-fiction novels.

©1992 by Michael Connelly. (P)1992 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Old Bosch take but good

A slow start but overall a good, albeit a bit predictable, story line and way to pass the time
In the car.

Entertaining

It may not be deep or meaningful, but it is fun and entertaining. The narration is great.

I always enjoy Michael Connelly's writting.

What did you love best about The Black Echo: Harry Bosch Series, Book 1?

It hot me hooked on Harry Bosch series

What other book might you compare The Black Echo: Harry Bosch Series, Book 1 to and why?

Nothing compares to Harry Bosch series. All that I have read are good.

Which scene was your favorite?

I can't say out of this book there was a "Favorite", all was good.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

I hated when I had to stop the book, if I had the time I would listen from start to finish

????Says headline optional

Great listen!! I love the Bosch TV series and this was definitely a great way to get to know him better!

Great start to series

This is a great way to start out the Bosch series. Michael Conley always introduces his characters perfectly.

Excellent crime fiction

Great intrigue and character development. Sometimes a little too much detailed description cause some drag but overall the writer’s ability to use words and figures of speech and the narrators ability to voice the words well provide an enticing and enthralling suspenseful plot in an audiobook that was difficult to let go. Looking forward to series!

great story. love Harry Bosch

I love Harry Bosch. This is a great series. I will listen to the whole series.

You'll love it!

I discovered Michael Connelly only after watching the first season of "Bosch," the video series on Amazon Prime that ran for seven seasons, and has recently (2022) rebooted as "Bosch Legacy," all eight starring the incomparable Titus Welliver as Hieronymus (“Harry”) Bosch. Welliver has lately become the reader of the Audible Bosch novels, too, including the first one, The Black Echo. But previous readers are also good, especially Len Cariou, a formidable Emmy-winning actor, and Titus Welliver’s immediate predecessor as the reader of Bosch novels. My only problem with Cariou is that he hams it up a bit too much, attempting to dramatize all the different speakers of the dialog. He’s good, but sometimes he’s a bit off – especially with the women’s voices – and he sometimes stresses the wrong word in a sentence, making its meaning unclear, or he gets confused as to what’s dialog and what’s narrative. It could be a matter of taste, but I prefer to hear speakers in my mind’s ear, so to speak, supplying the extra drama myself. Welliver does some dramatizing, too, but he's more restrained. Some of the novels are first-person narrative anyway, and all are largely told from Bosch’s point of view – at least until he begins to partner with a female police detective Renée Ballard, who is voiced by a woman reader. And Welliver’s, emphatically, is Harry Bosch’s voice, at least for me.

Outside of Connelly’s I don’t read a lot of crime and detective fiction, because I don’t like most of it. I’ve tried the writers Connelly himself cites as models, but Lee Child’s The Killing Floor is brutal, with a comic-book hero, while Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choir Boys struck me as puerile. Early in his career, John Grisham wrote a few good stories – The Firm, The Pelican Brief - but he seems lately to be just going through the motions, or maybe he’s hired ghostwriters, while Connelly does scrupulous work.

When his story requires expertise of some sort (as is frequently the case) he goes to the experts and gets it right. His geographic and sociological familiarity with Los Angeles is impressive, and I get a real feel for the streets and the people in them as I read his stories. He was a crime reporter for the L.A. Times for five years, and he knows police procedure cold. Bosch, who is something of a rebel, and is frequently in trouble with his bosses, is a dogged, methodical, yet insightful solver of crimes that baffle other detectives, but Connelly shows us step-by-step how Bosch does it. Harry’s motto is “Everybody matters, or nobody matters,” which leads him to take up crimes – mostly murders – that other policemen give up on, or that the higher-ups don’t want solved. The plots are complex and ingenious, with Harry frequently working on several cases at once, but it’s his rock-solid character – and its all-too-human limitations that help make him sympathetic – that lie at the heart of what makes these novels classics. Of course, there's an element of fantasy that makes his adventures far more exciting than routine police work, but it's close enough to seem realistic. And Harry gets into scrapes that would have killed an actual policemen twenty times over, but we go to fiction not for grim reality, but for a picture of life as it SHOULD be: after a struggle, the good guy solves the case, and justice is done.

Fills in the blanks

I have read all of the Harry Bosch mysteries over the past few years. While I am not a lifelong Dectective devotee, Harry Bosch is my favorite character and Michael Connelly is my favorite author. Somehow I have managed to read the 13 Bosch books in a random order. This book, The Black Echo, is the first in the series and recounts Harry Bosch's days as a "tunnel rat" during the Vietnam War. It does a good job of filling in the blanks that you only get bits and pieces about in the later works. As a testament to the talented pen of Connelly, much/most of the Bosch character is developed in this first book.

If you haven't read any of the Bosch series, this is a good place to start. If you have read later books, you will still enjoy this one.

Good Start to the Series

If you've decided to start the whole series after hearing a few of the latter books, then here you are. A little too 80's cop movie for me (drug dealers, Vietnam, dirty cops...) but worth the time.