Quotes from Michael Connelly

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

The tunnel was the place where vision narrows and the investigator sees only the bird in hand.

He was a worn-out old man whose eyes had quit caring about anything but the odds on three-year-olds.

Darkness waits. But it comes no matter what you do.

human tumbleweeds moving with the winds of fate.

Death is my beat. I make my living from it. I forge my professional reputation on it. I treat it with the passion and precision of an undertaker--somber and sympathetic about it when I'm with the bereaved, a skilled craftsman with it when I'm alone.

That's the problem here. It's Sunday. Everybody wants to go home. Play golf. Sell houses. Watch the ballgame. Nobody cares one way or the other. Just going through the motions.

Bosch took a step toward him. "Olivas, let's get something clear before we go anywhere. You call me 'Hotshot' again and I'm going to shove the file up your ass without taking it out of my briefcase.

All around them the cacophony of greed carried on in its most glorious and extreme excess.

It sometimes seemed to her as though the biggest barricades in the so-called justice system were on the inside, before you even got out the door.

Los Angeles: there was no rush hour because every hour was rush hour.

The sins of the father, he thought. His life and his world had once again clobbered his daughter. If he vowed to make those who did this pay, didn't that include himself?

We're all junkies. It's just different drugs. I wish I had yours, but I don't.

People lie, the president lies, corporations lie and cheat.…The world is ugly and not many people are willing to stand up to it anymore.

No matter what happens in the world, there will always be the need for heroes.

There was no going back to repair what had happened. You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

he had come to believe that parents see their children not only as they are but as they hope they will be in the future. Happy, fulfilled, not afraid. When Maddie first came to live with him Bosch didn't have this vision right away, but soon enough he earned it. When he closed his eyes at night, he saw her older:

I fully acknowledge that it is easier to knock something down than to build it in the first place. But

You know what they call a guy who switches sides in homicide? They call him a Jane Fonda, as in hanging with the North Vietnamese. You get it? It's crossing to the dark side.

Bosch always thought that if you started with the assumption that murder is an unreasonable action, then how could there ever be a fully

But then the world changes and your own DNA can unlock everything and secrets aren't secrets anymore.

Nobody should grow old." "And everybody should get the chance.

A preliminary hearing is a routine step on the way to a trial. It is one hundred percent the prosecution's show. The state is charged with presenting its case to the court and the judge then rules on whether there is sufficient evidence to take it forward to a jury trial. This isn't the reasonable doubt threshold. Not even close. The judge only has to decide if a preponderance of evidence supports the charges. If so, then the next stop is a full-blown trial.

The truth was, there was nothing in the law that I objected to more than the death penalty. It was not that I had ever had a client executed or even tried such a case. It was simply a belief in the idea that an enlightened society did not kill its own.