Angels Flight

Authors: Michael Connelly
Narrator: Peter Giles
Duration: 12H 53m
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌑
Tags: politics - detective - action

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Where Jack Reacher was just kicking everyone and silently disposing bodies this book raises many topics:

• political topics - how people would react on this event. Killer should be found or city will burn in flames. Someone should be blamed or people would be unrestful.
• You must follow protocols. And then get sued by guilty people because they can.
• You must attend press conferences
• Every shot should be accounted for
• Family relations and divorces

Written shortly (or not much) after events from 1992 riots in San Francisco this book is deeply influenced by them.

But the part of the book that is technology-related have aged so much:

• cell phone in cars
• Pagers
• Information superhighway
• Times when people have to explain how web pages and internet servers work

Things that i don’t like is the repetitions, and the end is kind of

Quotes:

He had been the aloof sort of supervisor. Didn’t socialize with the squad after hours, didn’t spend much time out of his office and in the bullpen. At the time, Bosch thought maybe that was good. It didn’t engender a lot of loyalty from Garwood’s people, but it didn’t create any enmity either. Maybe that was how Garwood had lasted in the spot for so long.

With cops the word motherfucker was rarely used. It was heard a lot by them but not used. With most cops it was reserved as being the worst thing you could say about someone. When it was said it meant one thing: that the person had crossed the righteous, that the person had no respect for the keepers of the law and therefore the rules and bounds of society. Cop killers were always motherfuckers, no questions asked. Defense lawyers got the call, most of the time. And Howard Elias was on the motherfucker list, too. Right at the top.

Bosch admired how Rider took Edgar’s frequent comments and sexual innuendo without more than a sarcastic remark or complaint fired back at him. Such comments could get Edgar in serious trouble but only if Rider made a formal complaint. The fact that she didn’t indicated either she was intimidated or she could handle it. She also knew that if she went formal, she’d get what cops called a “K-9 jacket,” a reference to the city jail ward where snitches were housed.

Bosch knew that to them it was like a couple of Nazis announcing they would investigate war crimes, but he also knew that it was important to go through the routine

(Sparks would now use the lawyer’s murder to any advantage he could) Bosch wondered how it was that good and noble causes often seemed to bring slick opportunists to the microphones.

They were silent, both absorbing the misery they had just brought to a family and how they had received the blame for it.

Because people are stupid, that’s why, Chastain. You want clever killers, watch TV.

A homicide case is like a shark. It’s gotta keep moving or it drowns. … You and your fucking fish. First fighting fish, now a shark.”

Court-approved searches were not always needed for the home and business of the victim of a homicide. But it made good sense to get warrants in high-profile cases. Such cases attracted high-profile attorneys if they eventually resulted in arrest. These attorneys invariably created their high profiles by being thorough and good at what they did. They exploited mistakes, took the frayed seams and loose ends of cases and ripped open huge holes — often big enough for their clients to escape through.

It was the kind of mystery Bosch liked. The idea of a man leaving his mark with the one shot he’s given appealed to him. Across a whole century, Bosch identified with George Wyman. He believed in the one shot. He didn’t know if he’d had his yet — it wasn’t the kind of thing you knew and understood until you looked back over your life as an old man. But he had the feeling that it was still out there waiting for him. He had yet to take his one shot.

(Husbands cheating) But I also think that if she knew then she was the type that would put up with it. There was a lot of social standing in being Howard Elias’s wife. Lot of wives in that position make choices. They look the other way on some things to keep the image intact, to keep the life they have intact.

The feeling of doom had fallen upon the marriage then. During the summer he had caught a series of time-consuming investigations, including a case requiring him to make a week-long trip to New York. While he was gone she went to the poker room at Hollywood Park for the first time. It was out of the boredom of being left alone and the frustration at her lack of success in finding an acceptable job in Los Angeles. She had returned to the cards, doing what she had done when Bosch had found her, and it was at those blue felt tables that

(About riots) Most of the people in the minority communities of Los Angeles have no power, have no money, have no voice. They subsist on hope for these things. And Howard Elias was hope for many of them. A symbol of hope for a day when things will be equal, when their voice will be heard. Of a day when they need not fear the police officers in their community. When you take hope away it leaves a void. Some people fill that up with anger and with violence. To simply blame it on the media is wrong. It’s much deeper than that.

In his mind he saw a swimming pool, its surface as smooth as a blanket on a bed. He remembered a time long before when he had been told his mother was dead and that he was alone in the world. He ran to that pool and dove beneath the calm surface, into its warm water. At the bottom, he screamed until his air was gone and his chest ached. Until he had to choose between staying there and dying, or going up and life.

Kincaid’s home office would have been able to accommodate the entire Hollywood homicide squad. It was a huge room with towering ceilings and bookcases along two walls that went all the way up to the ceiling. The centerpiece of the room was a desk that would have dwarfed Howard Elias’s. It looked as if you could build a nice-sized office inside it.

Bosch looked at the Capitol Records building as the freeway cut past it. It was supposed to resemble a stack of records with a phonograph stylus on top. But like most of Hollywood time had passed it by. They didn’t make records anymore. Music came on compact discs. They sold record albums in secondhand stores now. Sometimes all of Hollywood seemed like a secondhand store to Bosch.

He wondered if his inviting Sheehan to stay at his house had been a subconscious effort to avoid facing the emptiness of the place. After a while he decided it wasn’t. He had lived alone most of his life. He was used to places that were empty. He knew the real shelter of a home was inside yourself.

It wasn’t heavy rain, but in Los Angeles any rain at all can paralyze the city. It was one of the mysteries Bosch could never fathom. A city largely defined by the automobile yet full of drivers unable to cope with even a mild inclemency.

Bosch studied the deputy chief’s face. The implication was clear. Make any waves and your boat will be the one that gets swamped and sinks — and you’d be taking others down with you. Go along to get along. The company motto. That’s what it should say on the side of the cop cars. Forget about To protect and serve.

That was the problem with gang-banging a case — putting multiple investigative teams on it. No single pair of eyes saw all of the evidence, all of the leads or even all of the paperwork. Everything was split up. Though one detective was nominally in charge, it was rare that everything crossed his radar screen.