Narrows
Authors: Michael ConnellyNarrator: Len Cariou
Duration: 11H 01M
My Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐🌑
Tags: detective - action - thriller
Good Narration.
This one is decent - searching for a serial killer, bosch working with FBI to help, some romance.
Quotes:
You can become unhinged and cut loose from the world. You can believe you are a permanent outsider. But the innocence of a child will bring you back and give you the shield of joy with which to protect yourself.
He knew that good things come to those who plan carefully and then wait. That was the thing, the secret. Darkness waits. All things come to the dark.
You mentored me but that was ten years ago. I’ve now been in Behavioral longer than you ever were and I’ve booked more cases than you ever did. So don’t talk down to me and don’t act like my mentor or my mother.
Rachel had always found that agents in Behavioral were of two kinds. The first type she called “morphs.” These agents were much like the men and women they hunted. Able to keep it all from getting to them. They could move on like a serial killer from case to case without being dragged down by all the horror and guilt and knowledge of the true nature of evil. Rachel called them morphs because these agents could take that burden and somehow morph it into something else. The site of a multiple body excavation became a beautiful view better than anything at Quantico. The second type Rachel called “empaths” because they took all the horror in and kept it in. It became the campfire they warmed themselves by. They used it to connect and motivate, to get the job done. To Rachel, these were the better agents because they would go to the limit and beyond to catch the bad guy and solve the case.
He told me he was retired from his job but not from life. He said he still had a man’s needs.
I put everything on the page, the important and not important, the real connections and imagined connections. Just as experience had taught me about sleep and the ability to go long stretches without it, I knew the details were important. The answer is always in the details. What is seemingly not important now is all-important later. What is cryptic and unconnected now becomes the magnifying glass through which things become clear later.
“What’s all the hurry?” he asked as I pulled up and got out. “Velocity,” I told him. “Main thing about an investigation is to keep your velocity up. You slow down . . . and you slow down. I don’t want that.
That he had such a nice and expensive holder for a basic legal pad told Rachel that he was very proud of his work and what he did. Either that or the person who gave him the folder had those feelings.
Rachel noted how Dei pointedly did not say whether she wanted her to check up on Bosch or not. A nice way to have deniability if something went wrong.
She noted that Zigo must have attended the Randal Alpert school of building relations among fellow colleagues.
It was a place where men would go privately, taking care to leave no trail that would reveal them as having dipped in such murky moral waters. Married men. Men of success or religious piety.
In L.A. what they do if they want to get rid of you is give you what they call ‘freeway therapy,’ transfer you to the division furthest from where you live so you have to fight the traffic every day. Couple years of two-hour commutes and guys turn in their badges.”
Eleanor had told me once that the real players call the last card in hold’em the “river” because it gives you life or takes it away with it. If you’ve played the hand through to the seventh card, everything rides on it.
Led by the Behavioral Sciences section—the very unit in which Backus worked—this investigation seemed more concerned with the question of why he did what he did than with the question of how he was able to do it under the noses of the top experts in the killing field. This investigative direction was probably a protective measure.
It is an established pattern with serials that they commit what we call ‘triangle crimes.’ We see it often. That is, the victim can be traced through three points of a triangle. There is their point of origin or entry—their home or in this case the airport. Then there is what we call the point of prey—the place where killer and victim come into contact, where they crisscross. And then there is the point of disposal. With serials the three points are never the same because it is the best way for them to avoid detection.
I tried to talk to the two girls—it was hard to think of them as women despite what they did for a living and even though they were old enough. They probably knew everything there was to know about men but they didn’t seem to know anything about the world. In my mind they were just girls who had taken wrong turns or been kidnapped and taken away from womanhood.
I would see my daughter again but I wouldn’t be able to spend the kind of time with her I needed and wanted to. I was leaving to join the depressing legions of weekend fathers, the men who have to compress their love and duty into twenty-four-hour stands with their children.
I’m not against the bureau. My take is that it’s the most thorough, well-equipped and relentless law enforcement agency in the world. Its problems lie in its size and the many cracks in communication between offices, squads and so on down the line to the agents themselves. It only takes a debacle like 9/ 11 to make clear to the world what most people in the law enforcement world, including the FBI agents, already know.
It was the kind of rain that paralyzed the city. Traffic moved at a crawl on every street and every freeway. The roads weren’t built for it. The city wasn’t either. By dawn the storm water culverts were overflowing, the tunnels were at capacity and the runoff to the Los Angeles River had turned the concrete-lined canal that snaked through the city to the sea into a roaring rapids. It was black water, carrying with it the ash of the fires that had blackened the hills the year before.