Nightshade is only the third Connelly mystery not set in Harry Bosch, Renee Ballard, Mickey Haller aka Lincoln lawyer world. The first two were the excellent Blood Work (also a great movie starring Clint Eastwood) and A Darkness More Than Night. This short list also includes my all-time favorite Connelly thriller Void Moon. A Darkness More Than Night does not count as Blood Work’s McCaleb meets Bosch.
Perhaps because it is set on Catalina Island Nightshade, though a murder mystery, it is not as dark and brooding as the usual Michael Connelly offering (although the thriller starts with a story about a series of mutilations). CLICK TO BUY AT AMAZON
After a mess-up in a murder case in the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department DS Stillwell is sent to Catalina. That is where all the misfit cops end up. It is also where golf carts serve as police cruisers. He likes it there and becomes intimate with Tash, one of the island’s harbormasters.
The case is that Leigh-Ann Moss’ body is found anchored to a returning boat. Stillwell believes she was dumped at sea and her body got caught up in another boat’s wake. Leigh-Anne Moss worked for the local yacht club where she tended to hit on the rich men gathered there. There was also an odd theft the night Moss disappeared.
Though there are many secondary elements such as a beheaded buffalo, a drunk put in a cell for assaulting an officer, and plans for a giant ferris wheel on the island, Michael Connelly and Stillwell manage to tie up all these plot lines neatly and cleverly by the end of Nightshade
I appreciated the less claustrophobic and paranoid world Connelly has created with Nightshade. It is the fortieth Michael Connelly mystery and, like I said, a welcome diversion from the Harry Bosch, Renee Ballard, or Mickey Haller mysteries. Not that I, like all Connelly fans, am not looking forward to the next one in those series
Nightshade will please old-time fan Michael Connelly fans and is a different way to introduce readers to this excellent crime writer. Can I repeat that Void Moon is another mystery off the Connelly beaten path and my all-time favorite?
Nightshade
Michael Connelly
Little, Brown and Company 2025
341 pages
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