She Treads Softly: Nightshade

Sunday, May 4, 2025

Nightshade

Nightshade by Michael Connelly
5/20/25; 352 pages
Little, Brown and Company
Detective Stilwell #1

Nightshade by Michael Connelly is a very highly recommended police procedural/thriller. This marks the start of a new series from Connelly.

Due to infighting and office politics, L.A. County Sheriff’s Detective Stilwell has been transferred from homicide to policing Santa Catalina Island. He has come to enjoy Catalina. The first case he has is serving a search warrant in the investigation of an illegally decapitated buffalo on the island’s nature preserve. Then he is contacted when a hull scraper reports a body in a bag weighed down by an anchor chain in the harbor. Stilwell dives down to confirm the claim and immediately determines that the body has been in the water for days and it is a woman with a purple streak in her hair.

The mainland team takes over the murder investigation but Stilwell knows the detective assigned to the case, Rex Ahearn, is an incompetent investigator. He actually then has a tie-in to the homicide case when the exclusive, century-old Black Marlin Club reports the theft of a black jade marlin sculpture. The manager of the club thinks a waitress he fired may have stolen it. When looking into the theft Stilwell finds out she had a purple steak in her hair. This gives him a reason to actually investigate the murder.

This is a well-written, intricately plotted, and action-packed investigative procedural. The murder is the central investigation but at the same time there are several other cases, secrets, and corruption involved. Further complicating matters is that Stilwell doesn't trust the mainland detectives to do a thorough investigation. The clues and discoveries continue to be exposed at a fast and furious pace while the danger increases along with the complexity.

Stilwell is a well-developed character with strengths and flaws. He is tenacious, intelligent, methodical, and has great investigative instincts. Connelly has left plenty of room for further character development in future installments of the series. That would include the character of Tash, a woman who is the assistant harbor master and in a relationship with Stilwell.

Nightshade is a great choice for anyone who enjoys complex police procedurals. Thanks to Little, Brown and Company for providing me with an advance reader's copy via NetGalley. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.