Still, "The Poet" was crafty enough for Connelly to guarantee a built-in audience for the sequel, which is what "The Narrows" is. It's also the latest novel featuring Connelly's now retired LAPD detective hero, Harry Bosch. And it's the book that marks the end of Connelly's tales of Terry McCaleb (who first appeared in "Blood Work"), the detective whose retirement was forced by his heart transplant. In other words, "The Narrows" is Connelly's lollapalooza, a greatest-hits collection that is also a deck clearing, preparing the stage for the next portion of the Harry Bosch saga.

The parallel plots, which should be described as generally as possible, have to do with the return of the Poet and the female FBI agent who has been obsessed with catching him since he eluded her several years before, and with Harry's investigation into the death of McCaleb, which appears to be from something other than McCaleb's transplanted heart finally giving out. Connelly keeps a firm grip on the narrative even before the two stories converge, and through the book's changing voice. Shifting from third-person to two first-person narrators (Harry and the Poet), Connelly doesn't dilute his narrative drive or his ability to leave you hanging at the end of a chapter.

What is distracting and inescapable here are the patches of bad writing: "You can become unhinged and cut loose from the world. You can believe you are a permanent outsider. But the innocence of a child will bring you back and give you the shield of joy with which to protect yourself." Ewwww. As Bosch readers know, Harry found he had a 4-year-old daughter at the end of his last case, "Lost Light." But that's no excuse. (Ross Macdonald often talked about innocence corrupted without falling into that sort of squishiness.) If you're a Bosch fan, that passage -- and worse -- aren't going to matter. If you haven't tried Connelly, all I can say is that as a storyteller, he's good enough so that even crap like that isn't enough to keep you from turning the pages.

-- Charles Taylor

art

"The Ghost Writer"
By John Harwood
 384 pages
Harcourt
Order from Powells.com

You could label some elements of John Harwood's ghost story hokey: It's got veiled specters, accursed paintings, a big old deserted house with a sinister basement. But like one of those gifted cooks who can somehow turn a can of tuna and a handful of rice into a savory dish, Harwood knows how to spin shivers and nerves out of unpromisingly familiar material. "The Ghost Writer" is the first-person account of Gerard Freeman, who spends his 1960s boyhood in a remote Australian town plagued by millipedes and red dust, his father distant and his mother scared of her own shadow. The only time her apprehension lifts is when she's telling Gerard tales about Staplefield, the stately English country house where she grew up with her beloved grandmother Viola, an exotic realm of chaffinches and hawthorn hedgerows. But even her stories dry up when she catches her son snooping in a secret drawer, where he discovers an old literary journal containing a ghost story written by someone called V.H. and a photograph of a beautiful, unnamed woman.

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