Do you remember the year 2000? Twenty-five years on, I can barely recall all the fuss over "Y2K," but I think it was around that time when, in an airport bookstore, I spotted a novel by a writer I hadn’t yet tried, Michael Connelly, though I’d seen reviews praising him. The book at hand, if memory serves, was Angels Flight, published in hardcover in 1999 and in paperback the following year. I bought it to read on the flight back to Chicago—and loved it. I promptly acquired his earlier novels (Angels Flight was his eighth), starting with the first one, The Black Echo, published in 1992, and I’ve read (and reread) all of the books that have appeared since then. I’m sure a lot of other readers would say the same thing.

The latest, Nightshade, published two weeks ago, is Connelly’s 40th novel. It introduces a new protagonist, an L.A. County police detective named Stilwell, who—just over a year before the action of Nightshade commences—blew the whistle on a colleague, Ahearn, who had manipulated evidence in a homicide case they were both working. The black mark against Ahearn didn’t get him fired, but it put a ceiling on his prospects for promotion. Meanwhile, unfairly, Stilwell is shifted from the county’s homicide desk to Catalina Island, a beautiful place but a far cry from the challenging urban setting in which he had thrived.

Stilwell misses his old job, but he has come to love Catalina, and—recently divorced—he has connected with a woman who has spent her entire life on the island: Tash Dano, the assistant harbormaster, eight years younger than Stilwell. He is beginning to feel at home there. But the discovery of a murdered woman’s body in the harbor—she’s been stuffed into a bag weighted with chains—rekindles his instinct for solving murders and achieving a measure of justice for victims.

Like two of Connelly's signature protagonists, longtime LAPD detective and freelancer Harry Bosch and the much younger Renée Ballard (also an LAPD homicide detective), Stilwell has an unusually deep and intense empathy for those whose lives have been taken and a relentless drive to track down their killers. Connelly’s ability to create characters in this vein—and to connect them with one another—is surely one reason for his extraordinary success. After this first outing (oddly, in the entire book, Connelly never gives us the protagonist’s first name, a quirk I found mildly irritating), I am sure Stilwell will be a keeper.

Among many appealing qualities, Connelly’s generosity in acknowledging collaborators ranks high. He has often praised his longtime editor—justly so, no doubt. I feel as if in this book, though, she should have pushed back harder against one stylistic tic that grew increasingly irritating to me in the (mostly enjoyable!) course of reading. The bit I have in mind surfaces in the very first paragraph of the novel. The opening sentence mentions the thousand-foot "marine layer" over the entrance to the harbor. A bit further into the paragraph, we read: "Stilwell knew that as soon as the layer burned off, the weekenders would start arriving." Nothing there to stumble over. Then, at the beginning of the second paragraph, we encounter this: "His answer was punctuated by a foghorn from somewhere inside the layer. Stilwell knew by the tone that it was the Catalina Express about to come through the shroud." This repetition of "Stilwell knew" was a little burr that briefly interrupted my absorption in the narrative. Did Connelly intend to emphasize just how observant, etc., Stilwell is as a rule?

I quickly got back into the flow of the narrative—but then, a few pages later, I came to a paragraph that begins "Stilwell knew the stages of decomposition in cold water" and concludes with another sentence beginning "Stilwell knew." Yes, really. And for the rest of the novel, the refrain (sometimes with slight variations: "Stilwell nodded. He knew…") was both an irritant and a distraction, sometimes generating mini-parodies in my mind. So it goes. This didn’t spoil my enjoyment of the book, which features an all-too-convincing villain (arrogant to the nth degree) and (as is typical of Connelly’s fiction) a rich variety of minor characters in an intriguing setting. I am already looking forward to Stilwell’s next outing.

Nightshade
by Michael Connelly
Little, Brown and Company, 352 pp., $30

John Wilson writes about books for First Things, Prufrock News, National Review, The American Conservative, and other outlets.