Over the course of 13 thrillers, Michael Connelly has created so many characters that he could write an entire book without cooking up anyone new—and, in his 14th, The Narrows, he more or less does just that. Ostensibly another of his popular Harry Bosch detective stories, The Narrows also features the return of one of Connelly's most notorious creations, an FBI officer turned serial killer known as The Poet. Along with The Poet, Connelly brings back a cast of FBI and former FBI agents, including Terry McCaleb, the heart-transplant patient who served as the hero of Connelly's novel Blood Work.
The Narrows opens with McCaleb dead and his wife calling on Bosch to investigate. It also opens with multiple references to the Clint Eastwood film adaptation of Blood Work, which exists in Connelly's world as a movie based on a true story. (Connelly's characters listen to Lucinda Williams, read Ian Rankin, watch SpongeBob SquarePants, and crave McDonald's cookies and Starbucks coffee.) The Narrows, like Connelly's other books, holds to a shaky line, emphasizing procedural grunt-work in a specific, real-world setting, while also examining the psyches of people whose neighbors and coworkers frequently turn out to be murderers.
FBI agent Rachel Walling, who works alongside Bosch against her superiors' orders, is one of those stung, cautious Connelly characters—mainly because The Poet used to be her boss and is now her stalker. She and Bosch trek from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and back, stopping at desert brothels and abandoned rest areas while piecing together clues to The Poet's whereabouts and future victims. Connelly shifts back and forth between their perspectives (first-person for Bosch, third for Walling), which heightens the tension by giving readers information that the heroes don't have, but it also creates a link between the two detectives' history as the victims of bad timing in unforgiving bureaucracies.
Some bookstores are selling copies of The Narrows bundled with the DVD Blue Neon Night, a documentary in which Connelly plays Los Angeles tour guide in areas that figure in his books, explaining how his stories connect via landscape. It's an entertaining promotional item, and useful for showing how Connelly's words extend off the page, though the documentary doesn't dig enough into the pervasive pessimism that makes his heroes' small victories exciting, though ultimately pyrrhic. The haunting atmosphere of The Narrows and Connelly's other thrillers derives from an understanding that in a hyper-connected world, every path is inevitably a dead end, with emphasis on the "dead."