“A Darkness More Than Night” should be one of my all-time favorites. It’s by Michael Connelly, whose work I widely admire. And it features two of my favorite characters of his – Terry McCaleb and Harry Bosch. And yet somehow, it comes up a touch short.McCaleb became a great character in “Blood Work” (made into a movie with Clint Eastwood, I haven’t seen the movie so I can’t vouch for it) as a former FBI agent who is forced to get a heart transplant and ends up investigating the death of the woman whose heart saved his life.

Harry Bosch has featured prominently in many of Connelly’s books such as “Angels Flight” and “The Concrete Blonde“. Connelly paints him as a good cop/bad cop all rolled into one. Harry’s passionate about finding murderers with a dark past as a tunnel rat in Vietnam. Harry is a character that you can read about in book after book without ever feeling that you know all that is going on in his head.

All that being said, “Darkness” starts out promising enough, winding these two great characters together in a complex mystery, but at some point, it just started to break down for me. I thought McCaleb became too goody-goody and Harry’s dark-side (which I usually love) was also overplayed until it became more of a psycho-drama than a solid mystery.

Don’t let this turn you away from Connelly, he’s written a number of great books. And if you like this kind of “mystery”, you’re sure to enjoy Patricia Cornwell’s early novels (such as “Body of Evidence” or “From Potter’s Field“) as well.