Finishing 2011 with The Drop and Alpha Better Juice

Here are the final two books of 2011.

Tomorrow we'll post the full 2011 reading list, the results of two Internet reading "challenges" and my thoughts on the best reads of 2011.

Book 135: The Drop by Michael Connelly

Detective Harry Bosch returns in Michael Connelly's The Drop. Fans of Connelly's novels, and I count myself among them, know what to expect -- a tightly written, riveting thriller that keeps the accelerator to the floor from the first page to the last.

Yeah, Connelly's that good. And although I'm also a fan of defense attorney Mickey Haller, another Connelly character, I think Bosch is his finest creation.

Bosch is hard-nosed and uncompromising, yet clings to a romantic view of his job as a detective.  "Everybody counts or nobody counts" is the maxim that motivates Bosch in his crusade to bring justice to the forgotten victims of brutal crimes. 

That motto ensnares Bosch in a political tug-of-war between the L.A. city council and the police commissioner.  Councilman Irvin Irving's son is found dead. Did he leap from the seventh floor of his posh hotel room or was he dropped? 

Irving, "scourge of the LAPD in general and one Detective Harry Bosch in particular," asks that Bosch be assigned the case because he believes Harry will tell him the truth about what happened to his son "no matter how it falls."

The death of Irving's son isn't Harry's only case.  A hit on a 20-year-old cold case -- a spot of blood on the victim's neck -- belongs to a convicted sex offender. Results of DNA testing are overwhelming, yet that sex offender couldn't have committed the brutal rape and murder because he was only eight years old when the crime was committed.

How'd his blood end up on the neck of a murder victim?  The answer to that question leads Harry and his partner to a horrific discovery.

Two crimes to investigate and along the way Connelly continues to explore Harry's relationship with his 15-year-old daughter, conflict with his partner and a new girlfriend.

The Drop? Connelly's editors at Little, Brown could have called it The Bomb.

Book 134: Alpha Better Juice by Roy Blount Jr.

Alpha Better Juice is Roy Blount Jr.'s second collection on words with an emphasis on the way words sound.

Blount has coined a word -- sonicky -- to describe both the way many words sound and their meaning.

"I needed a word that combined sonic and kinesthetic," he writes. "I needed . . . to describe an intrinsic significant value that . . . does evoke meaning by a combination of its sound and its movement."

Blount takes exception to theoretical linguistics, which contends that the relations between words and their meanings is arbitrary.

"Any huckster, any animal caller, any lover, any poet, anybody knows better than that," says Blount. "The sounds of letters and the words they constitute, and the kinetics involved in their oral utterance, and the rhythms of their combinations, have inherent signficiant value."

Sonicky words, to name only a few, include bubble, fuzz, knickknack, skimpy, gobble, smooch and ooze.

Blount is best known for his humorous writing.  In Alpha Better Juice, he strikes a perfect balance; he's serious about words and how words sound, but he's entertaining to the point of evoking an occassional guffaw -- another of those sonicky words.

Connelly on top of his game in The Fifth Witness

To quote Randy Newman, "Baby, I'm guilty." I am six books in arrears on my posts. That's due to the arrival of Portal 2 two weeks ago.  Yep, I chose playing a video game over blogging.

Now that the game has been dispatched (the single player at least), I can turn my attention to the stack of books on my computer table. Here's the first:

Book 46: The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly

I do not know how Michael Connelly does it.  For years, the former journalist has written one best seller after another. His novels, which manage to be both popular and critically acclaimed, were largely police procedurals featuring L.A. homicide detective Harry Bosch.  There was also the occasional one-off.

In 2005, with The Lincoln Lawyer, Connelly introduced a new character and a new direction. The character was a clever and charismatic defensive attorney, Mickey Haller. The new direction was the courtroom drama. Somehow, Connelly didn't miss a beat. The Lincoln Lawyer -- now, as they say, a major motion picture -- was one of Connelly's best books.

Last year, in The Reversal, Connelly did his own version of World's Finest or Marvel Team-Up, pairing Bosch and Haller in a riveting story that had Haller working for the prosecution. 

Haller returns for a solo gig in The Fifth Witness, and he's back as a defense attorney. His client, a woman losing her home to due to foreclosure, is accused of killing an employee of the bank that held the mortgage.

Haller doesn't care if his client is innocent or guilty. The reader does and Connelly laces the book with clues as to who killed the banker.  Clues I didn't notice until the end of the book when Haller and I arrived at a similar conclusion.

The courtroom drama isn't my favorite sub-genre of mystery.  I find so much of the inside the court goings-on a tad tedious. Not with Connelly.  He has full command of the material -- never letting things get stale or boring. He has full command of the pace and characterization too.

Connelly reaches the bestseller list book after book because he's a masterly writer. Police procedural or courtroom drama, it doesn't seem to matter.

I don't know how he does it, but I am exceptionally glad he does.

Is The Reversal Connelly's best book?

Book 98: The Reversal by Michael Connelly

Is The Reversal Michael Connelly's best book?

If it is -- and it may well be -- that's saying something. Connelly has been at the top of his game a long time. Most writers lost their snap this many books into their career, but Connelly keeps it fresh.

The Reversal features Connelly's two leading characters -- Harry Bosch, the tough-as-nails L.A. homicide detective, and Mickey Haller, the defense attorney whose is office is the backseat of his Lincoln.

The novel is part courtroom drama, part police procedural. An appeals court has kicked the conviction of Jason Jessup, who has been in prison for 24 years for the murder of a 12-year-old girl. A DNA sample on the victim's dress doesn't belong to Jessup.

Soon Jessup is headed back to L.A. to face a new trial. Haller is enlisted to serve as a special prosecutor in the case. In turn, he recruits Bosch to serve as special investigator.

On its surface, there isn't anything to the story you haven't read before or seen in the movies or on a bad TV show. But Connelly, with great pacing, vivid scenes and characters who jump off the page, transcends the genre. This is a book, a story, that compels you to read it and it's a damn gripping read.

The question remains: Is The Reversal Connelly's best book? At least, until his next book is released the answer is yes.
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