The Black Echo

The Black Echo (1992) is Michael Connelly’s first novel and the first book in the long-running series featuring Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch. It won the 1993 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and is now a classic in the modern crime genre. Connelly, who worked as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times while starting his career as a novelist, has written over 37 novels, including 24 featuring Detective Bosch. His works have been adapted into multiple films and television series.

The Black Echo is a police procedural inspired by a real unsolved bank robbery case that Connelly covered as a reporter. The novel follows LAPD Detective Bosch as he unravels a conspiracy behind the murder of a Vietnam veteran, battles demons from his own experiences in the war, and navigates the poor priorities of and possible corruption in multiple law enforcement institutions. It deals with themes such as the postwar Vietnam Veterans’ Trauma, the mundanity of violent crime that results in jaded investigators to contrast Seeking Justice Versus Policing, and police corruption stemming from the Insularity of the LAPD.

This guide refers to the 2017 paperback edition from Grand Central Publishing.

Content Warning: The Black Echo contains depictions of gun violence, addiction, anti-gay bias, and an attempted statutory rape, all of which is referred to in this guide.

Plot Summary

Hieronymus Bosch is an LAPD detective within the Hollywood Division, having recently been suspended from the force and demoted from the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. After a young graffiti artist reports a dead body in a water pipe, Bosch and his new partner, Jerry Edgar, are called to the scene. Everyone, including Edgar, thinks the dead body is the result of an accidental heroin overdose, but Bosch has a hunch it is murder. He recognizes the victim as Billy Meadows, a tunneller from the same unit as Bosch during the Vietnam War. Though he hasn’t seen Meadows in 20 years, Bosch feels he owes it to the man to investigate his death.

After some meticulous police work, Bosch connects Meadows to an unsolved bank robbery. He brings what he found to the FBI agents in charge of the case, Eleanor Wish and John Rourke, but the agents refuse to work with Bosch. They report him to LAPD Internal Affairs to get him off their back; Director Irvin Irving and his goons Lewis and Clarke begin investigating Bosch with hopes to get him kicked off the force for good. Bosch’s lieutenant orders him off the Meadows case, and Bosch races to solve the case before he is suspended again. He is also ready to sabotage his career by feeding everything to his contact at the Los Angeles Times.

Suddenly, the FBI agents rescind their complaint and offer to work with Bosch (while Internal Affairs continues to investigate in secret). Bosch partners with Agent Wish, and they find the graffiti artist who reported Meadows’s body: a teenager named Sharkey who robs gay men in West Hollywood. Bosch and Wish interrogate Sharkey while butting heads over police procedure. They learn that Meadows’s body was dropped off by two people in a jeep. That night, Wish shows up at Bosch’s door to apologize for being difficult to work with; they bond over Bosch’s experience in the Vietnam War and Wish’s memories of her brother, who never made it back. They make a truce and agree to work the case together.

The next day, Bosch and Wish visit a halfway house where Meadows stayed after a stint in prison. They discover that Meadows was there at the same time as two other Vietnam veterans: Franklin and Delgado. Bosch suspects that the three tunnellers are responsible for the bank robbery, which was accomplished via a tunnel dug under the vault. Bosch also conjectures that Meadows was killed by his partners. Bosch and Wish have sex. They are awoken with news that Sharkey had been killed.

Bosch suspects that there is an inside man in either the LAPD or FBI. Feeling responsible for Sharkey’s death, Bosch violently confronts Internal Affairs officers Lewis and Clarke for following him and bugging his phone. Later, Bosch discovers that the bank robbery included a safe-deposit box owned by a Vietnamese immigrant named Binh. Binh was a corrupt police captain in Saigon during the war, and it is suspected that he and another captain, Tran, emigrated to the United States in 1975 with millions of dollars in diamonds. That night, Bosch and Wish are nearly killed by a speeding car.

The next day, Bosch and Wish track down the two Vietnamese men. They discover that the tunnellers are planning a second heist at a private Beverly Hills vault to steal the rest of the diamonds from Tran. Agent Rourke coordinates a joint FBI and LAPD surveillance of the vault and places a SWAT team to catch the criminals on their way out—opening the vault while Franklin and Delgado are inside would be too dangerous. During the stakeout, Bosch discovers that Rourke was Meadows’s commanding officer in Saigon and suspects that Rourke is the inside man. Meanwhile, Lewis and Clarke assume that Bosch is complicit in the robbery of the Beverly Hills vault; when the vault alarm goes off, they open it, getting themselves killed.

Bosch follows Franklin and Delgado back into the tunnels under the vault. Bosch kills Franklin and overcomes his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) enough to climb through the tunnels, but Delgado shoots him in the shoulder. Suddenly, Rourke shows up and kills Delgado. He is about to kill Bosch, too, but Wish shoots Rourke just in time, saving Bosch’s life. The next day, Bosch wakes up in the hospital and is interrogated by Internal Affairs. Irving tells Bosch that it wasn’t Lewis and Clarke who bugged his phone. Bosch escapes the hospital and, after reviewing the case, realizes that Agent Wish has been lying to him. He attends Meadows’s funeral, leaks some crucial details about the case to a Los Angeles Times reporter, and then confronts Wish. Wish admits that she orchestrated everything to get revenge on Rourke for the murder of her brother. Bosch threatens to tell Binh and Tran unless Wish turns herself in.