So, back in February, I picked up The Lincoln Lawyer--just out of curiosity--and I was drawn into Connelly's world like it was full of free cookies and milk. I read all the Haller books I can find on my library's Libby collection, and along the way picked up the first two Rene Ballard books before I realized that Bosch had this long history. Every time he told an old story to Haller or Ballard, I kept thinking that I'd love to know more about that, so eventually I broke out of the other series and read those stories. And in some of those stories, he refers to things that happened to him earlier and so I read those books.
I'm not reading the books in any order. At this point I've read everything with Bosch in it from The Overlook to the Dark Hours. It's like eating peanuts or potato chips, I finish one and find another one.
Right now, I'm reading Angel's Flight, and it's as gripping as any of Connelly's later work. The only problem I have is the cringe-inducing scene where Kiz is explaining the Internet to Bosch and Edgar. I'm in my early 60s and worked in IT in the 90s, and while some of the details were on point-->!people did actually forget to delete default passwords on web servers!<--some of the metaphors and explanations made me wince. I always hated the Information Superhighway metaphor.
I also laugh in embarrassment at the fact that they all have cell phones, pagers, and landlines. We all did, and even at the time I didn't know why. It wasn't until 2005 or 2006 that we got rid of our landline.
I'm loving these books and I will be sad when I have read them all and start having to wait for the next one. In this book, he mentions Trunk Music and The Concrete Blonde, so I have to decide which to read next.
Spoiler tag on a 27-year-old book because you never know. It took me 27 years to read it.