Truly True Crime
I’m lying in bed reading and again imagining myself as Harry Bosch. Make no mistake; I’d never want to be Harry Bosch. After all, he’s an orphan and a troubled Vietnam vet who toils as a homicide detective on LA’S grittiest streets. Yet as I read, I wish I knew what he knows, or at least had his presence of mind.
Bosch is the ruminative, unrelenting star of ex-journalist Michael Connelly’s crime fiction books and, frankly, one of my guides to the moral universe. After reading the umpteen Bosch books we’ve published in Select
Editions over time, I see him as the ultimate wounded warrior fighting for redemption—for LA’S down-and-out and for himself. “Everybody counts,” he says, “or nobody counts.” As he quietly struggles to raise a teenage daughter while corralling his partners and fellow former tunnel rats to help him with his often-grueling investigations, his history leaves him with no means of coping beyond the haunted self-sufficiency that I admire from my comfy bed.
A lot of you, I know, love true crime stories. RD has always featured them; this issue, we bring you a piece from the Marshall Project and Frontline that sheds chilling new light on DNA’S value as evidence. But for crime that is somehow truer than true, I recommend Select Editions.
Every volume contains four compelling, quick-read novels. Invariably one or two feature a complex lawenforcement character—such as Kate Burkholder in author Linda Castillo’s books about the Amish of Ohio; Mike Bowditch, writer Paul Doiron’s Maine game warden; or my old friend Harry— wrestling with authentic, deeply researched issues of the heart.
If you’re interested, go to selecteditions.com/rdmar19. We have a good offer there. And
thanks, as always, for reading.