Mandalit del Barco spent a day with Connelly as he toured the City of Angels the way he and Harry Bosch see it. His protagonist, Harry Bosch, travels through L.A. I recommend it highly.Before Michael Connelly was a best-selling mystery novelist, he was a beat reporter covering crime for the Los Angeles Times. The story is as well narrated and very interesting. Everything had to be done differently before the iPhone, and as usual, fiction shows this best. For instance, Harry Bosch says 'Stop! There's a phone!' Of course, he saw a phone booth he wanted to use, but I was wondering if someone had dropped the phone in the street. Also, it is interesting to listen to s story written before cellphones. The story unfolds the frightening, foreign, dark tunnels of his past with the darkness in his life the historical darkness of the tunnels is an allegory to the state of people's hearts, and of the places the Vietnam Veterans ended up in America.

Here, Detective Bosch finds a murder victim in a Hollywood tunnel who turns out to be somebody he fought with as a boy in the tunnels of South Vietnam. A lot of bad evil things happened there in the war, and were carried back in men's minds, as in the mind of Harry Bosch, the main character. Connelly brings to life the Tunnel Rats-the soldiers that lived and died in the dark, their screams heard as a black echo, just going on and on. I pressed my nose up against our Panasonic to watch the first horrible scenes ever shown live or nearly so on TV. I wasn't quite old enough to have experienced the Vietnam War, but my older sister was, and we used to watch the numbers come up in the morning newspaper, wondering which one of her friends would go next. When war is sewn into a story, it illustrates and makes real the suffering those who were int hose jungles experienced, teaching something we should all understand.

When true history is woven into a story it gains dimension, and we all learn something. Black Echo is a very cool book, first off, because it says something about the Vietnam War that I never knew before, and I love history. Writers have a lot of energy when they first write a character they have that twinkle in the eye, just like in a new romance. I had to go back and listen to the first ever Harry Bosch book, and I'm glad I did. Connelly brings Tunnel Rats to life in style

Bosch the black echo