Nightshade (2025) – Michael Connelly

The last Connelly book I read, The Proving Ground, was also copyright 2025, so I guess he’s still cranking ’em out in volume.

The hero of that book was good ole Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer
(who now keeps the Lincoln in the garage and drives an EV :).

This book introduces a new protagonist. He’s abrasive and kind of a hard-ass (think Bosch), but resourceful and interesting.

His name is Stillwell.

That’s all we get for a name! I looked for a first name, and could not find it. So I guess that’s going to be a thing here, like Shane, the lone seeker of justice!
Or Reacher … “just Reacher”.

I’m sure Connelly has some point in doing the one name thing, but I’m not into it. I think it’s a useless affectation. I’m sure the dude does actually have a first name. His girlfriend probably uses it when she asks him to pass the ketchup, so why do we pretend it doesn’t exist?

Anyway, Mr One-name is a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s detective (Bosch was a Los Angeles City detective). He has been banished to Catalina Island for being the loser in some kind of intramural pissing contest back on the mainland. This gets explained in some detail around p 164.

We learn that many people on the island are there because they messed up on the mainland somehow. They are hiding from someone or something. Pretty much all the government employees are there because they pissed somebody off on the mainland.

Getting sent to Catalina seems to be the LA County version of getting sent to Siberia.

It’s supposed to be a big demotion, but waking up on Catalina Island every day looks pretty sweet to me!

You’re quickly introduced to what a quirky place it is.

• Everyone drives golf carts!
• There’s a herd of buffalo (American Bison) on the island, brought there on the 1920’s for a movie that never left!

The Story begins

It’s a foggy evening, and our hero Stilwell has driven out to the Harbor to pick up the presiding judge who is cruising over to the island on his sailboat!

They do this every week. He meets the judge and drives him (in a golf cart) to the “justice complex”.
This time he gets him to sign a search warrant along the way.

p 14 The next morning Stillwell executes that search warrant at a garage to search for evidence of a bison killing! He finds the evidence he was looking for in the form of traces of animal blood on a skill saw. He gets hassled by the owner, a charming fellow everyone calls Baby Head. You can tell already that Stillwell is Bosch-like in his knack for pissing off the rich and powerful without even trying!

The Body

Then the real action starts, a hull scraper (person who scrapes the hulls of rich folks boat while they are docked at the harbor) spotted a dead body in the water while he was 30 feet down scraping hulls.

p 20 We learn later that Stillwell was on the County dive team before his sparkling personality got him moved somewhere else, so he does have diving skills. He dives with the scraper dude to check it out personally. He can’t see much, but he thinks he sees a streak of purple in the corpse’s hair.

Mainland sends out a homicide team that unfortunately includes the bozo that Stillwell got in trouble with to get exiled to Catalina.

32 For a little dark comedy, the homicide bozo, Ahearn, falls in the bay! He wore his city shoes, slick-soled leather soles and wasn’t careful on the wet gangway, and took a dive. This of course makes him hate Stillwell even worse 🙂

43 Stillwell introduces us the harbormaster, a woman named Tash. They just do work stuff this time, but the next time we see her we learn that she and Stillwell are an item! It started casusally when he was assigned to Catalina, but they’re gettin pretty serious!

46 The once a week local newspaper comes out on Saturday, to be fresh for the weekend crowds. There were three stories on the front page:

1. Harbor Homicide: Bound body recovered.
2. Tourist interests want to build a giant ferris sheel you could see from the mainland.
3. Mystery of the mutilated buffalo. It was decapitated and someone kept the head! Connelley throws in a bit about the island’s long history of UFO sightings.

All three turn up again in this story later, so pay attention! 🙂

Tuesday at the Black Marlin Club

50 The big weeknd is over. There were 26 arrests! Most were inconsequential, but there was one: a fellow who broke a bottle over a deputy’s head in a bar. Stillwell notes some unusual behavior in the bar video.

54 Of the 16 crime reports over the weekend, only one was interesting: a felony theft at the Black Marlin Club (BMC). Even the name is ominous! :))

The BMC is a more than century-old private club. Invitation-only membership of rich mainland families with big yachts. Get used to that abbreviation, we’ll be using it a lot!

We’ve learned a few things so far:

• Stillwell is an abrasive fellow that gets under people’s skin as part of doing his job … sometimes by design, sometimes because he’s just an annoying guy.
• Previous undersherffs have put in their time on the island, and scurried back to the mainland as soon as their time was done.
• Stillwell feels like “he’s come home” out here.
  • He’s met a great woman (Tash), and loves the place and the job.
  • He thinks he might stay here forever.
• He’s gonna start nosing around at the BMC.
  It seems predictable that he’s going to piss off some rich people.

The theft was of a small black jade sculpture of a black marlin. Stillwell learns that an employee Leigh-Ann Moss was fired from the BMC around the time it disappeared.

We are all pretty sure she’s the body in the bay.

• 67 Stillwell visits the BMC.
• Leigh-Ann was fired for “overly flirtations behavior”. Meaning it was clear that her whole reason to work there was to get her hooks into a rich guy.
  • Apparently she was very attractive.
• 90 Tash lets him look at the harbor videos from when the body appeared.
  • 92 There are suspicious things going on on the Emerald Sea.
  • It’s a ketch (a two-masted sailboat) owned by a corporate lawyer named Colbrick.
• 97 There’s some slightly sketchy stuff going in there but he can’t pursue it.
• 101 He is going to go to the mainland to nose around a bit.
  • Everyone knows this is a terrible idea since he’s been ordered to stay away from the case.
  • He’ll be in Big Trouble of he gets caught … but he of course does it anyway!
• 104 He goes to the apartment of a nice guy, slovenly actor who Leigh-Ann crashed with then she needed a place on the mainland.
  • It was the address she gave on her BMC application even though she didn’t really live there.

Diving Backstory

112 Way back, before he was a homicide detective, Stillwell was assigned to the Sheriff’s dive team. As long as he’s on the mainland, he meets his old dive team boss Saunders at a bar and pumps him for info on the case he’s not supposed to be working on.

He learns the body was in a sail bag, a nice canvas bag for storing a jib-sized sail. That seems like a clue!

Mixing with the rich guys

• 119 Still on the mainland, Stilwell chats up Colbrick, the owner of the Emerald Sea.
  • Great example of how our guy is quietly annoying. He purposefully doesn’t ring the Colbrick’s doorbell til 9:15 in the evening, because he likes to catch folks when they least expect it.
• 125 Anyway, he intimidates Colbrick into giving him permission to search the boat. Colbrick insists on going with him.
• 126 Stillwell gets to see the inside of the California Yacht Clob (CYC) in Marina Del Rey, where Colbrick keeps the boat.
  • We discover that the bag for his jib is new!
• 133 Back on the island, interviews Colbrick’s “crew”, which is one guy, Duncan.
  • Seems to me like he could’ve just driven out and talked to the guy, but instead he has him arrested and brought in handcuffed for jum[ping probation on a marijuana bust ten years ago.
  • Serious asshole behavior if you ask me.
• 147 He makes a simple process complicated, but eventually they settle down, and Stilwell decides Duncan is not a suspect, he is a witness, but still …
  • 152 … because of the arrest thing the poor dude still has to spend a night in their lockup.

Homicide Backstory

• 156 Just when he gets Duncan sorted, Ahearn pops up wanting his badge!
  • Ahearn has visited the slovenly former boyfriend, who was surprised, because he had already been visited by the police, i.e. Stillwell.
  • Just reading, I saw this coming a mile off, but somehow Stillwell didn’t!
• Captain Corum is the head of Sheriff’s Homicide. They all have a conference call.
  • It’s against Stillwell’s nature to be open with people, but he has to give a little here if he wants keep his job, much less stay on this case.
  • So he gives the Captain (and us) his theory:
    • 160 “I think Moss was killed inside the BMC with the jade statue.
    • The body was put on the bag and taken out to sea the next day and dumped. Currents brought it back.“
  • It works! Stillwell is now officially on the case.
• He’s ordered to come to the mainland because Corum wants the team to have a face to face meeting.
  • He’s picked up at the ferry by Sampedro, the other homicide detective, who so far is just a normal guy, not a corrupt moron like Ahearn.
• The bad blood with Ahearn was before Sampedro’s time, so in the car to police headquarters, Stillwell tells (his side of) the story of why he was kicked off Homicide and banished to Catalina:
  • 164 It’s a depressing story of departmental ass-covering and corruption:
    • a cop named Dobbins got kicked off the force for corruption
    • Because the department let him retire with a clean record he was able to get a clean PI license.
    • He kills a guy in a divorce case he was hired for.
    • Ahearn was the lead investigator on that shooting.
      • Stillwell was on the team.
    • Dead guy’s wife said it was a setup.
    • Stillwell wanted to investigate, but Ahearn took the word of a former cop (and closed it out.
      • He later finds out Ahearn and Dobbins were academy buddies.
    • Stillwell won’t let it go.
    • He discovers the gun was stolen 10 years in a case involving Dobbins.
      • Clear implication is that Dobbins grabbed it for future use.
  • Stillwell thinks the wife made a deal with Dobbins to kill the guy and split the money.
  • Stillwell went straight to IAB with all this rather than take it to Corum.
    IAB covered up the whole thing except:
    • AH got an “unfounded complaint” in his permanent records and
    • Stillwell got sent to “the Island of Misfit Toys“. (love that! 🙂
• 168 Now we’re back in the present.
  They have their meeting and it’s pretty civil.
  They rehash everything.
  • The only new info is that Stillwell plans to get a search warrant for the BMC, which is sure to piss everybody off over there!
• 173 Now Stillwell is back on the island doing his regular job.
• Connelly treats us to in more local color:
  • Still has to go handle an eviction the Zane Grey Hotel!
  • That’s a real place turns out. The author built a home out there that was later made into a hotel.
• More pages on the life of a Catalina sheriff …
• 186 Finally something case-related.
  • A girl named Leslie let Leigh-Ann bunk with her sometime, until Leigh-Ann stopped paying rent.
  • Leslie still has all her stuff in a bag!
• 195 She says Leigh-Ann claimed to have a boyfriend who was gonna pay the back rent.
• 196 The only thing interesting in Leigh-Ann’s stuff was a $1,200 pair of barely worn Prada heels.
• 205 There was a card in the shoebox from “Dan”.

• 208 Leigh-Ann met a guy named Daniel Easterbrook on weekends at the Mt Ada Hotel.
• 212 Back at the substation, Henry Gaston was there, VERY scared! He is the fellow that worked in the tour cart repair place where Stillwell got the blood-stained skill saw.
  • I thought the buffalo thing was going to be just a little side show, but it keeps turning up in the story!
• 214 Gaaston tell a long story about his boss (and likely buffallo killer) Baby Head (Oscar Terranova) and the mayor colluding on some kind of deal over the Big Wheel.
• 216 Stillwell lets him spend the night in the lockup because he’s so scared.
• 218 Early in the book we met the judge who comes to the island every week, now we meet Monika Juarez the District Attorney.
• 221 We finally hear Stillwell’s theory on the buffalo:
  • A buffalo with it’s head missing will make the mainland news, and pique interest in the extra-terrestrials that are a sure-fire draw for folks to come to Catalina.
    • Pretty weak, but I think that’s it!
• 223 Stillwell is going to take Juarez back to the station to talk to Gaston, and that’s when the action really starts!

Action Movie interlude

• At the station:
  • The deputy is hancuffed and concussed, with a blood-stained head.
  • Spivak, the jerk who clocked the deputy in the bar is gone.
  • Gaston, who they just put there 2 hours ago “for his own protection” is very dead.
  • Finally, the “tech loset” was sprung open, and the hard drive where he reorded the interview with Gaston is gone!
• 227 Stillwell gets it pretty quickly. It was all planned!
  • Spivak hit the deputy, to get put in jail, so he could kill Gaston if necessary.
• 230 The homicide crew comes over from the mainland. Captain Corm turns out to be way more interested in keeping his own ass covered than he is in solvong anything.
• 238 Then things get REALLY tense, Spivak is still on the island and has kidnapped Tash, to make Stillwell destroy the skill saw he still had locked up n the evidence locker. (How did Spivak know that??)
• 240 Stillwell does some trickery with phone GPS to determine more or less where they’ve got Tash.
• He used his diver skills to go there by Zodiac rather than on land.
• 244 He finds them, kills Spivak and frees Tash woo hoo!
• 249 We spend a few pages with two OIS investigators (whatever that is), going over Stillwell’s actions.
• 261 Back on the mainland again, he goes to the fancy home of Daniel Easterbrook. His wife has kicked him out, and he’s currently living in a crappy apartment in South Pasadena.
• He was with her the weekend she was murdered. They excanged bodily fluids the night before (which means the coroners will eventually know about him).

• 270 He visits Juarez at the Long Beach Superior Court building.
• 274 It was NOT a happy visit. Terranova has “661” tattooed on his forearm, signaling that his from Bakersfield (661 area code).
• He’s found that Juarez is also from Bakersfield and in fact requested t be assigned to Catalina.
• She and Terranova and Spivak were all homies from the 661!
• She has been the leak all along.
  • That’s how Terranova knew the skill-saw was still on the island.
• 281 Stillwell is narrowing in onthe notion that the BMC manager, Charles Crane killed Leigh-Ann.

To wrap it all up, tbe fool Ahearn does the foolish thing and charges Easterbrook with the murder, but when they go to arrest himhe’s hung himself. [Apparently he really did, there was never any reveal that it was staged by shadowy forces…].

Stillwell and Juarez get Terranova to flip to the point of playing recording that nails the mayor for the murder in the substation. So Stillwell has the great pleassure of perp-walking the mayor out of a meeting and on to a helicopter to the mainland.

Sadly, looks like Terranova is going to skate on everything, even the bison slaughter. We’ll get him in the sequel!

Charles Crane killed Leigh-Ann, we think the jade sculpture broke when he used it to kill her. She had her hooks in him as a way to keep her job until she hooked an actual rich guy. When she nailed Easterbrook she tried to dump Crane, and he didn’t take it well.

Looks like he and Tash are gonna be ok, they’re camping on the other side of the island at the end of the book.

Epilogue

(all these books have one, why can’t I?)

I commend the author for resisting the urge to set up a high-speed golf cart chase somewhere in the book. If there’s a sequel I’ll bet there is one!

After making to the end of a 1423 page book, this little ole 336 page book seemed like an appitizer. 🙂