List $31.98Written by Michael Connelly - Audio book performed by Len Cariou, Carl Franklin & Nancy McKeon - Abridged Nonfiction - 5 COMPACT DISCS - 6 hours
Publisher, Time Warner Audio Books (May 2006)
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From #1 bestseller Michael Connelly's first career as a prizewinning crime reporter--the gripping, true stories that inspired and informed his novels.
Before he became a novelist, Michael Connelly was a crime reporter, covering the detectives who worked the homicide beat in Florida and Los Angeles.
In vivid, hard-hitting articles, Connelly leads the reader past the yellow police tape as he follows the investigators, the victims, their families and friends--and, of course, the killers--to tell the real stories of murder and its aftermath.
Connelly's firsthand observations would lend inspiration to his novels, from The Black Echo, which was drawn from a real-life bank heist, to Trunk Music, based on an unsolved case of a man found in the trunk of his Rolls Royce. And the vital details of his best-known characters, both heroes and villains, would be drawn from the cops and killers he reported on: from loner detective Harry Bosch to the manipulative serial killer the Poet.
Stranger than fiction and every bit as gripping, these pieces show once again that Michael Connelly is not only a master of his craft, but also one of the great American writers in any form.
About the Author: MICHAEL CONNELLY decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.
After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986 he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors that was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.
After three years on the crime beat, Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published in 1992 and later won the Edgar Award for best first novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Connelly followed up with three more Bosch books before publishing The Poet, a thriller with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist, in 1996. In 1997 he went back to Bosch with Trunk Music and in 1998 another non-series thriller, Blood Work, was published. Blood Work was inspired in part by a friends receiving of a heart transplant and the attendant survivors guilt the friend experienced, knowing that someone died in order that he have the chance to live. Connelly had been interested and fascinated by those same feelings as expressed by the survivors of the plane crash he wrote about years before. With his friend acting as both technical and emotional advisor, Connelly wrote the book about a former FBI agent with a heart transplant who gets caught up in a web of murder. Connelly's' books have won the Edgar, Anthony, Nero, Maltese Falcon (Japan) and .38 caliber (France) awards. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.
About the Performers: LEN CARIOU is a distinguished stage, television, and film actor best known for his film roles in Thirteen Days, Executive Decision and One Man. He appeared in the TV mini-series Nuremberg, and on the series The West Wing, The Practice, and Law and Order, among many others. He earned a Tony Award for Best Actor in Sweeney Todd, and read The Redhunter by William F. Buckley, Jr. for Time Warner AudioBooks
CARL FRANKLIN is an acclaimed actor and director whose films as a director include One False Move; Devil in a Blue Dress and Out of Time, both starring Denzel Washington; and One True Thing, starring Meryl Streep and Renee Zellweger.
NANCY McKEON has been a series regular on The Division, Style and Substance. The Facts of Life, and Can't Hurry Love (which she also produced). Nancy read Street Dreams by Faye Kellerman for Time Warner AudioBooks.
