The novelist Michael Connelly has given us some memorable characters over the years—the no-nonsense Harry Bosch, the quick-thinking and fast-talking Mickey Haller, and the intrepid cold-case-cracking Renée Ballard. Now we have a new cop in Connelly’s crime-fiction world—Detective Sergeant Stilwell—introduced last year (without a first name) in his new Catalina series.
Unlike Connelly’s other ace investigators, Stilwell—or Stil for short—doesn’t live in gritty Los Angeles or its environs. He runs the sheriff’s station on Catalina Island, 22 miles off the coast of California. Stilwell used to work homicide on the mainland, but he accused a colleague of obstructing justice and was shipped off to Catalina after an internal review ruled against him. The island is “a transfer destination for deputies who had somehow run afoul of the department’s command staff,” and Stilwell is always running afoul of command.
Life on Catalina is quiet—at least initially. In Nightshade, the first of two books in the series so far, our detective finds himself investigating poaching and petty crimes, keeping his misfit deputies in line, and attempting to negotiate small-town politics, at which, of course, he fares poorly. It’s a far cry from chasing down bad guys in L.A., but he tries to make the best of it. He has met someone new, Tash, after an acrimonious divorce, and they enjoy drinking wine and watching old movies in the evening and eating lunch at a local diner.
Luckily for Stil—and us—things don’t stay quiet for long. A woman’s body is discovered submerged in the harbor, which leads to another murder, the discovery of corruption in the mayor’s office, and much else besides. Stilwell is not supposed to work the murder case, but he does so anyway, and his success at getting to the bottom of things eventually puts Tash in serious danger. Stilwell shows up just in time, against all odds, to save her, and all’s well that ends well, or so it seems.
The second book in the series, Ironwood, which was published this May, is set a few months after the final events of Nightshade. The mayor is awaiting trial for corruption, and Tash seems to have recovered from the traumatic events in the first novel. But a drug bust at the local airport goes wrong, and one of his deputies is killed while another is seriously injured. Stilwell is told, once again, to respect protocol and not investigate. But he, again, does so anyway. After all, these were his people: “He felt a responsibility to them … to make sure justice prevailed. … So he remained a dog with a bone, unable to let go.” As he discovers, the incident at the airport wasn’t a drug bust gone wrong, and there is more to his boss’s attempts to keep him on ice than respecting protocol.
Connelly’s books rarely give us just one murder, and in Ironwood, Stilwell also becomes involved in a hunt to find a serial killer after the killer himself leaves a clue at the harbor and the remains of a young woman are discovered up island. Why a man who had taken such care to hide his crimes over the years—burying his young female victims four feet deep—would suddenly court the attention of the police is a question Stil himself asks and never satisfactorily answers. But he doesn’t have time to solve the riddles of the human heart. No sooner has Stilwell put the perp behind bars than he finds himself hunted by a particularly lethal killer backed by people in powerful places.
Another Connelly staple is to bring his characters into each other’s books, and who else than Renée Ballard works with Stilwell to solve the serial killer case. She is more than a little impressed with Stil’s skills and surprised at everything he has had to deal with on Catalina since moving there. “Small island, big crime,” he tells her. She nods, and so do we.
Stilwell is not Connelly’s most finely drawn detective. You know the type: fast-acting tough guy who has a problem with authority, a good heart, and an unbending commitment to justice. But the change in setting to Catalina is refreshing, with its small-town characters, ocean views, and hills.
Connelly always sprinkles his novels with a few references to current events to give them a contemporaneous feel. In Ironwood, both ICE and Southern California wildfires get a mention, but Connelly handles these with a light touch. He’s not writing for the ages or to change the world, he’s writing for us and to make a buck.
He’ll make more than a few with Ironwood. I enjoyed it more than Nightshade, and if I’m right about what comes after, his next Catalina novel will be even better.
Ironwood: A Catalina Novel
by Michael Connelly
Little, Brown and Company, 336 pp., $32
Micah Mattix is the editor of Portico.
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