Michael Connelly

http://www.michaelconnelly.com/

While he was attending the University of Florida, Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler. He chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing. Time would prove he'd major in and become a master of both.

After graduating in 1980, he worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, primarily on the crime beat, during the height of the wave of murder and violence that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. Then, in 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. Their story on the crash was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, and it raised Connelly's profile as a first-rate journalist. Talent doesn't sit idle for long, and soon after, Connelly headed west to Los Angeles — to Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles — where he landed a prized job as a crime reporter at the Los Angeles Times.

There's no way he could have known then just how fateful a move this was. Just three years into the job covering crime in L.A., Connelly set to work on The Black Echo, the first of many novels to feature LAPD detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch. Published in 1992, the book won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel and raised Connelly's profile again, this time as a first-rate author. His debut novel was partly based on a crime that occurred in Los Angeles around the time of his early days at the Los Angeles Times.

Connelly followed up his first novel with three more Harry Bosch books, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote, before going on to write The Poet in 1996 — a thriller with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist. In 1997, he returned to Bosch with Trunk Music, and in 1998, he offered fans another nonseries thriller, Blood Work. It was inspired in part by a friend's heart transplant and the attendant survivor's guilt he experienced, knowing that someone had to die in order that he could live. Connelly had witnessed this response before in the survivors of the plane crash he had written about years before. Blood Work was released in 2002 as a major motion picture directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. Even though Eastwood made significant changes to the plot, it still made Connelly's day to have worked with one of his longtime idols.

He then went on to write Angels Flight (1999), the nonseries novel Void Moon (2000), about a high-stakes Las Vegas thief, and A Darkness More Than Night (2001), which united Harry Bosch with Terry McCaleb from Blood Work and was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. And then there were two in one year: City of Bones (2002) and the stand-alone thriller Chasing the Dime, which was also named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. Lost Light (2003) followed and was the first Bosch book written from the first-person perspective. The Narrows (2004), which revealed Connelly's unfinished business with the villain in The Poet , was his tenth Bosch novel.

In 2005, Connelly brought out two #1 bestsellers: his eleventh Bosch novel, The Closers (May 2005), and The Lincoln Lawyer (October 2005), his first-ever legal thriller, both debuting at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.

In 2006, Michael Connelly had three offerings: His first nonfiction book, Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops & Killers, was published in May 2006. Connelly's twelfth Harry Bosch novel, Echo Park, was released in October 2006, and recently won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category. And the serialization of The Overlook, an original Harry Bosch novella, was published in the New York Times Magazine's "Funny Pages," and ran every Sunday for 16 weeks. Michael rewrote The Overlook as a novel (May 2007) with new, never-before published material. His next novel, The Brass Verdict, will be published in October 2008, and features both Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller from The Lincoln Lawyer.

Connelly's books continue to win numerous awards. While Harry Bosch continues to live in and solve cases in L.A., Connelly now resides with his family in Florida.