The Hollow by Michael Connelly

 For a retired LAPD cop, Harry Bosch is busy with two cases in the works in The Hollow by Michael Connelly coming out in October. One case has pulled Harry back to the 1960s after a massive class action lawsuit has netted billions in settlement for the former residents of MacLaren Children’s Center, Harry being one of those from age 11 to 16.

 

Entitled to some of that disbursement, Harry wants justice instead, calling upon his connection to Detective Renee Ballard and her cold case division. He was already working with her to finally catch the murderer in a case he had not been able to close in 2001. Using a little ingenuity and a bug hidden in a bouquet of flowers, together they are bringing a successful conclusion to the long unresolved case.

 

Now Harry could devote all his time to the children’s home that was a pit of abuse and neglect and to getting justice for a long-dead teen named Charles “Chops” Lamb. Called inmates because the center was under the jurisdiction of the state probation department, they often fought among themselves, earning time in the hollow, a cramped storage space under the staircase in the administrative wing of MacLaren’s.

 

Working a case as only Bosch can—"everybody counts or nobody counts”—he learns from old case files that Chops’ death appears to have been covered up as little investigation was done. Being Harry, he uses his skills to dig deep, finding a former probation officer who is still alive and was working at MacLaren’s at the time of the boy’s death, albeit he is in a care home with memory loss.

 

With just the right spark of a memory about an incident the day before Chops’ death at MacLaren’s, the retired guard lights the way to Harry bringing down a cruel murderer, putting Harry’s own scarred history to rest. Problem is, Harry’s hunt for justice knocks heads with the FBI’s own pursuit as the killer has a long list of crimes, one a current threat about some missing ammunitions including Hellfire missiles.

 

Note: some of the elements of the story are based on real incidents and real people, and MacLaren Hall was a real place, a house of horrors, open from 1961 until it was closed in 2003 and is being rebuilt as a city park in El Monte, California.

 

This reader is so grateful that Michael Connelly is still writing Harry Bosch stories, this one being the 26^th.

 

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting August 22, 2026.

I would like to thank Little, Brown and Company, the Hachette Book Group, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

 

The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian

 A tear in the putting net, a line drive with a golf ball, the name “Kenny” called out, and a teen responding to his name combine to result in the death of the young man in The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian which became available August 4, 2026.

Mira Winston already lived life on the edge what with experimenting with booze, drugs, and sex with older men since she was 15 years old. Warning: this tale is told with a side of raunch! As a rebellious yet reliable narrator—she says so!—Mira tells the story of the day she killed Kenny

While her action that day resulting in the death of Kenny Foster is truly a freak accident, Mira believes that by killing him, she is deserving of the downward spiral that actually began before she ever swung her club that fateful day.

On August 3, 1978, in Talmadge, a tony suburb of New York City, temperatures are in the 90s when the 18-year-old golf prodigy shot her practice ball with a wooden club into the net while she awaited her time to tee off. First thinking the ball hit but not killed Kenny, Mira’s first reaction was to laugh at the pratfall. When she realized what had really happened, she abandoned her golf clubs, never to play again.

Not only does she give up the sport in which she excelled, but also she defers her entry to Yale and moves away from Talmadge where everyone knows she killed the caddy but also broke up another family through her affair with the much older husband.

Worse, the broken net leads to both criminal and civil liability with fingers pointing to Mira as the one who purposely caused the net to fail that fateful day by altering the net. The incident becomes a courtroom drama that is dramatically brought to a climax by a confession from one sitting in the courtroom audience that day.

Easily read in one session because of the driving force of the narrative, this novel packs a lot as it covers Mira’s life up to the point where she is writing a memoir given that she is a novelist who has written 26 books and several plays, a nod to author Bohjalian who has done exactly that. As a reader, this reviewer is amazed at how well a male writer captures the angst of a rebellious teenage girl.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting August 16, 2026.

I would like to thank Doubleday Books and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.

 

 

The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett

 Seventeen years have passed since Kathryn Stockett wrote the blockbuster The Help, but she’s back with another book about strong-willed women facing adversity in The Calamity Club released May 5. Setting the story in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1933, she uses this historical fiction to take aim at the atrocities women faced in that time period.

A law passed in 1928 made it legal to sterilize anyone deemed an “imbecile,” which was used to a large part against promiscuous women, all decided by an all-male board. This impacts 11-year-old Meg Lefleur who finds herself placed in an orphanage in Oxford run by a woman worse than Miss Hannigan in “Annie.” Meg has been singled out and is persecuted by the matron who was behind the prosecution of Meg’s mother, a victim of the 1928 state statute.

Birdie Calhoun has arrived from the Delta to visit her socialite sister Frances. Her goal is to ask for money because she and their mother and their grandmother have fallen on hard times like many during the Depression. One of the ways Frances has been working to become part of the inner circle in Oxford is by volunteering at the orphanage.

Frances asks Birdie to use her bookkeeping skills to help prepare for the upcoming audit at the orphanage. Birdie finds the office is also being used for little Meg who has been pulled out of the orphanage’s school program as a punishment for a picture she drew. Birdie clearly sees how Meg is mistreated and befriends the little girl.

All is not as it seems at the antebellum mansion when Frances and her mother-in-law find they are in dire straits when their wealth suddenly disappears due to mismanagement by Rory, Frances’ husband, who has disappeared. Birdie tries to find ways for them to cope with the possibility of losing their home and their belongings.

By happenstance, Birdie runs into Meg’s mother Charlie, a woman who has been victimized by the sterilization law. She, too, is down on her luck with little to lose but now that’s she’s been released from a prison farm, she wants her daughter back.

Putting their heads together, Birdie and Charlie concoct an audacious plan to earn money to help Frances, her mother-in-law, Birdie’s family back home on the Delta, and Charlie and Meg. Elements of the plan are against the law, and if they are caught, the earned money could be taken away. Desperate times, desperate people.

Stockett brings all these threads together in this 638-page story celebrating the strength of women in times of crisis.