Michael Connelly Books in Order – Complete List of Novels

Last Updated on October 18, 2023

New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly is an amazing American author best known for his Harry Bosch series, which was recently televised by Amazon, with Titus Welliver playing the main character. The Harry Bosch novels in order are the perfect read for anyone who loves heart-stopping thrillers with lots of action and great characters, as well as for readers who enjoy the novels of James Patterson.

Here are all the Michael Connelly books in order in reading and publication order for the Harry Bosch novels, followed by Connelly’s other series including The Lincoln Lawyer Mickey Haller, Terry McCaleb, Jack McEvoy, and Renée Ballard.

New Michael Connelly Books

Harry Bosch Books In Publication Order

1. The Black Echo, 1992
2. The Black Ice, 1993
3. The Concrete Blonde, 1994
4. The Last Coyote, 1995
5. Trunk Music, 1997
6. Angels Flight, 1999
7. A Darkness More Than Night, 2001
8. City Of Bones, 2002
9. Lost Light, 2003
10. The Narrows, 2004
11. The Closers, 2005
12. Echo Park, 2006
13. The Overlook, 2007
14. The Brass Verdict, 2008
15. Nine Dragons, 2009
16. The Reversal, 2010
17. The Drop, 2011
18. The Black Box, 2012
19. The Burning Room, 2014
20. The Crossing, 2015
21. The Wrong Side of Goodbye, 2016
22. Two Kinds of Truth, 2017
23. Dark Sacred Night, 2018
24. The Night Fire, 2019
25. The Dark Hours, 2021
26. Desert Star, 2022

Harry Bosch Short Stories

• Suicide Run, 2011 (includes: Cielo Azul, Suicide Run, One Dollar Jackpot)
• Angle Of Investigation, 2011 (includes: Father’s Day, Christmas Eve, Angle of Investigation)
• Switchblade, 2014 (Harry Bosch #18.5)

Lincoln Lawyer Series in Publication Order

1. The Lincoln Lawyer, 2004
2. The Brass Verdict, 2008
3. The Reversal, 2010
4. The Fifth Witness, 2011
5. The Gods Of Guilt, 2013
6. The Crossing, 2015 (#5.5)
7. The Law of Innocence, 2020
8. Resurrection Walk, 2023

Terry McCaleb Books in Publication Order

1. Blood Work, 1998
2. A Darkness More Than Night, 2000

Jack McEvoy Books in Publication Order

1. The Poet, 1996
2. The Scarecrow, 2009
3. Fair Warning, 2020

Renée Ballard Books in Publication Order

1. The Late Show, 2017
2. Dark Sacred Night, 2018
3. The Night Fire, 2019
4. The Dark Hours, 2021
5. Desert Star, 2022

Standalone Novels in Publication Order

• Chasing the Dime, 2003
• Void Moon, 2004
• Hieronymus Bosch: A Mysterious Profile, 2022
• The Lincoln Lawyer: A Mysterious Profile, 2022

Other Author Contributions – Anthologies and Collections

• The Best American Mystery Stories 2003 (Best American Mystery Stories)
• The Best American Mystery Stories 4, 2004 (Best American Mystery Stories)
• The Secret Society of Demolition Writers, 2005
• Penguin Book of Crime Stories, 2007
• The Blue Religion, 2008 (Mystery Writers of America Presents)
• Mystery Writers of America Presents Vengeance, 2012 (Mystery Writers of America Presents, edited by Lee Child)

Non-Fiction Books

• Crime Beat, 2006

Should We Read the Michael Connelly Books in Order?

I’ve read all the LAPD detective Harry Bosch books in chronological order so far (including the related legal thriller Lincoln Lawyer books, the Renée Ballard books, and all the rest) and personally, I think reading them in order is best. Granted, each novel has one mystery that Harry solves, however, the character really grows from book to book.

You can see in each of the novels that the author gets more and more attached to Harry Bosch and really writes about him with a passion. It is a pity to miss out on that.

About LAPD Homicide Detective Harry Bosch

Harry Bosch is a fun and multidimensional character with a real-life story of his own. In the first novel, he is accused of killing a Vietnam “tunnel rat” whom he happened to know many lifetimes ago. I remember the book was full of atmosphere and a fast read. It literally hooked me on the series and I have read everything he has written since then.

Harry Bosch is a Los Angeles Police Department detective who retired and went on to become a private investigator for a couple of books, following which he returned to LAPD’s Open Unsolved Unit. He is about 5 feet, 10 inches tall, with a wiry frame and a small but strong build, sports a moustache and has dark eyes. His mother was a prostitute and his father a defense attorney.

In Two Kinds of Truth, published in 2017, Harry Bosch is a volunteer cold case cop at SFPD and is asked to help with a case involving a pharmacy where a young employee was murdered.

At the same time, he gets involved in a case started by the newly created LAPD Conviction Integrity Unit, which tells him that signs are showing that he mishandled some old cases back when he was working for the police.

Since he left the police on relatively bad terms, his old colleagues are not overly eager to help him save his reputation. Now Harry has to work the murder case while trying to get to the bottom of who framed him and how he can clear his name and reputation as well.

In Desert Star, published in 2022, Detective Harry Bosch teams up once again with Renee Ballard.

Are Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller related?

Yes, indeed they are. The Lincoln Lawyer Mickey Haller is Harry Bosch’s half-brother. Both have the same father, J. Michael Haller, however, they have different mothers.

Mickey Haller’s mother is a Mexican-born B-level actress about whom very little is known from the books or the TV series.

Harry Bosch’s mother is Marjorie Lowe, who was basically a prostitute in Hollywood who got pregnant after having sex with Harry’s father once. She died in 1961 (was murdered).

Harry Bosch was already an adult when he first met Mickey Haller and their father. At the time, Mickey was only five.

There are a few books in the Lincoln Lawyer Mickey Haller series that also have Harry in them but not as the main character. While some Haller books only mention Harry in passing, some feature the two of them working together, like in The Crossing.

Harry is the ultimate detective. Initially, all the cases seem hopeless and unsolvable, but Harry is the one who finds something small that belongs to the case.

Once he finds that short thread, he follows it until he uncovers more threads, and follows there too, just like a dog following a strong smell, right until he solves the case. I really like his reluctance to give up on a case because he knows it will unravel in front of his eyes if he only keeps at it a bit more.

Harry has a daughter, Maddie, who initially was mostly living with her mother, Eleanor, the ex-wife of Harry. The two lived in Hong Kong and only meet Harry a couple of times a year until eventually Eleanor was killed while trying to save Maddie from Chinese gangsters. After the funeral, Maddie went to live with her father.

Where else has Harry Bosch appeared in books?

LAPD detective Harry Bosch has made several cameo appearances in books by other crime and thriller authors. He appeared in books by Robert Crais, Joe Gores, and Paula Woods.

Michael Connelly Biography – About the Author

Michael Connelly was born in 1956 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When he was 12 years old, his family moved to  Fort Lauderdale, Florida. There he enrolled at St. Thomas Aquinas High School.

The author’s introduction to the world of crime happened in an entirely random way. One evening he was going home from his job as a dishwasher at a hotel. He suddenly noticed someone throw something into the bushes. Curious as he was, he checked out those bushes and found a gun wrapped in a shirt.

He got even more curious, so he decided to follow that person, on a trek that took him to a nearby bar. He then went home to tell his dad about the guy in the bar. Together, they went to the police, and he led them to the hidden gun. By then, the suspect was gone from the bar.

However, he was thoroughly fascinated with the way the police handled that case, and he couldn’t get that event out of his mind.

He continued his studies and enrolled at the University of Florida in Gainesville with a major in building construction, as he wanted to follow his father’s job. His grades were, however, not up to par. After watching Robert Altman’s 1973 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s book The Long Goodbye, he decided that he wanted to become a crime fiction book author. The movie was based on Raymond Chandler’s books, so he began reading everything the author has written and it inspired Connely even more to start his own author journey.

Thus, the author switched his major from construction to journalism. His minor was in creative writing, which helped him develop as a book writer. After he graduated from the university in 1980, he became a crime-beat writer at the  Daytona Beach News Journal. Next year, he moved to work for the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel again as an investigative reporter.

In 1985 he was one of the reporters to interview the survivors of the Delta Flight 191 plane crash. The story he wrote thereafter made him a candidate for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1987 he moved to Los Angeles, California with his family, where he began working for the Los Angeles Times as a crime reporter.

He had been working for the newspaper for three years when he wrote The Black Echo, his debut novel. The book was published in 1992 by Little, Brown. That book earned him the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award for Best First Novel. The book is also the first in the Harry (Hieronymus) Bosch series.

While working for the Los Angeles Times, Connely wrote three books, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote, all part of the Harry Bosch series. Soon after, he resigned and became a full-time author.

The author continued his series until 1996 when he wrote The Poet. It was to become the first book in his Jack McEvoy series. The next year he wrote The Trunk Music, which went back to the popular Harry Bosch book series.

After that, the author once again diverged from his main series when he wrote Blood Work, the first book in his Terry McCaleb FBI Agent series. This was in 1998. Four years later, in 1992, the movie made based on Blood Work starring Clint Eastwood was released, where Eastwood played Terry McCaleb and also directed the movie. Other notable acctors were Jeff Daniels and Anjelica Houston.

A second movie adaptation was for the book The Lincoln Lawyer. The movie featured Matthew McConaughey as the main character Mick Haller next to Marisa Tomei and Ryan Phillipe as co-stars.

For his numerous books, Michael Connelly received several awards, including the Edgar Award, the Anthony Award, the Macavity Award, the Shamus Award, and the Barry Award, as well as several international awards from countries like Italy, France, and Japan.

Many of his books are written surrounding actual, real-life events, including the 9/11 attack. Most characters in the series appear in the same universe and often crossover from series to series. In the latest series, LAPD detective Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch work together in solving cases.

In 2004, a video documentary titled Blue Neon Night: Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles was released in the form of DVD. This was accompanying the author’s book The Narrows (which also features FBI agent Rachel Walling). In the feature film, Connelly shows some of the Los Angeles places often featured in his books.

Besides his several mystery and thriller series, the author also wrote a nonfiction book called Crime Beat, which was published in 2006.

An interesting trivia note, one of his biggest fans is the ex-US president Bill Clinton, who was seen reading The Concrete Blonde. The two men met at an airport later on.

The Harry Bosch series order includes all the rest of the author’s books as well since they are all part of the Harry Bosch universe. In fact, even the standalone books are part of the same universe.

Michael Connelly has written so far two main series, the Harry Bosch series, and the Mickey Haller series, and a few smaller series including the Terry McCaleb, Jack McEvoy and the newer LAPD detective Renée Ballard series. Most of these series also intersect with the author’s main one, so I have added them to this page as well. Thus reading the Michael Connely books in order is recommended, along with all the related stories in the same universe featuring other main characters.