Book Review: A detective banished defies orders not to investigate a murder in Connelly’s ‘Nightshade’

Detective Sergeant Stillwell of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department has been banished from the homicide division. His sin: accusing his former partner of dropping a murder case for lack of evidence when, according to Stillwell, there was plenty of it.

Branding him a troublemaker, his superiors packed him off to Catalina Island and put him in charge of a small, backwater office where cases normally range from petty theft to drunk and disorderly.

This was supposed to be punishment, but Stillwell likes it. The island is beautiful. Recently divorced, he’s already found a new love there. And he’s relieved that he’s free of department politics — or so he thinks.

In “Nightshade,” Stillwell is introduced as a new series character by Michael Connelly, whose other repeating protagonists, including Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer, are regulars on the bestseller lists and subjects of popular television series. Like Bosch, Stillwell doesn’t bow to authority and is relentless in the pursuit of justice for crime victims. However, he’s younger, easier to get along with, and seemingly less prone to violence.

The trouble starts when a workman scraping barnacles from the hull of a yacht discovers the body of a woman bound to an anchor at the bottom of the harbor. The local mayor, whose main concern is attracting tourists and developers to the island, demands that the case be handled quietly.

In his new role, Stillwell is required to turn the investigation over to the homicide division on the mainland, but when his former partner is assigned to the case — and ultimately arrests the wrong man — Stillwell again defies authority and launches his own investigation. In the end, he not only identifies the real killer but exposes the kind of dark conspiracy he thought he’d escaped when he moved to the island.

At first, the plot unfolds slowly as the author introduces a new community of characters, but soon the pace picks up. As always with a Connelly novel, the characters are well drawn and the prose is tight, precise and easy to read.