Bosch back on police force — for now
“Desert Star” feels like a swan song for detective Harry Bosch, the protagonist of 25 Michael Connelly novels (depending on how you count them). But, since every book concludes with Bosch quitting the Los Angeles Police Department or abandoning his subsequent private practice or annoying some criminal or legal kingpin, the crabby detective has seemingly been in mid-swan song ever since he was a cygnet.
True to form, Bosch is supposedly retired as “Desert Star” opens but occasional collaborator Renee Ballard — Connelly’s prime character, now on her fifth outing — lures him out of retirement with the promise of work on a cold-case unit that will let him focus on the ones that got away, judicially speaking. So, Bosch is back on the force for the length of a book, anyway.
Connelly has juiced the pace of his breakneck thrillers lately, often doubling up on the crimes, so we get Harry roughing up suspects in the long-ago murder of an entire family as well as a more recent killing, whose female victim was the sister of his and Ballard’s new boss.
Both cases are absorbing, and Ballard’s outings with Bosch have made her a sharper (and crankier) character. Best of all, Bosch gains intriguing depth as he faces down death, unsure of the legacy he’s leaving his daughter, also now a cop, or the corpsestrewn streets of Los Angeles. — Chris Hewitt, Minneapolis Star Tribune
Onyi Nwabineli’s debut novel “Someday, Maybe”
follows Eve EzenwaMorrow through the strange, depression-ridden soup of time immediately after her husband’s death. The title phrase reemerges throughout the book as Eve navigates
the uncertainty of her newfound widowhood.
On the first page, we learn that the main character found her husband, Quentin Morrow, who she thought was perfectly happy, after he killed himself on New Year’s Eve.
A lot of expectations come with that shocker of a prologue: high drama, fast pace, mystery.
Dramatic proves to be a great word to describe this novel. Fast-paced and mysterious? Only a touch. Most of the story happens at Eve’s home in London, where she is haunted by reminders of Quentin and the life they shared, her phone a secondary character that is ignored as a host of family members and friends try — to little avail — to contact her.
Days lurch forward erratically, stitched together by memories that bubble up from Eve’s childhood and, later, her relationship with Quentin, a photographer from one of London’s elite families. Through these flashbacks, readers accompany Eve as she slowly confronts her relationships and conflicted feelings.
Nwabineli deftly weaves Eve’s Igbo heritage into the story, incorporating phrases, food and traditions.
Eve’s experience as a Black woman in an interracial marriage with a major wealth gap between their families proves key in contextualizing her fraught relationship with her ice-cold mother-inlaw, Aspen.
Then, about halfway through the book, Nwabineli drops a bomb that changes the rules of the game. What had become a lull of spiraling depression gets the jolt that Eve — and the story — needed.
Readers should beware that the novel deals with suicide, and does describe aspects of Quentin’s death in scraps of memory sprinkled here and there. But Nwabineli doesn’t go on to clarify the method until tastefully late in the book, handling the subject in a way that is both respectful and honest, capturing Eve’s raw emotions.
“Someday, Maybe” is an earnest study on grief that forces you to examine it and not look away. For as long as the anguish is there, we are in Eve’s head experiencing it with her — along with all the wellmeaning but misguided and haphazard attempts by friends, family and co-workers at “fixing” it.