Michael Connelly, who knows how to wait: in suspense America!

In who knows how to wait, Michael Connelly signs a thriller while restraint, where patience becomes a moral virtue and memory, a tool of justice. A sober, lucid novel, which confirms its place among the great columnists of the American reality.

Once again, the American writer continues his meditation on justice, memory and time, in a precise and introspective thriller where each silence tells in the state of the world. At Michael Connelly, the thriller has never been a simple set of tracks. Since its inception, it is a prism through which observing the cracks of a country in perpetual recomposition. Who knows how to wait, last opus translated into French by Robert Pépin and published by Calmann-Lévy, is fully part of this vein. The investigation matters there, of course, but it seems above all pretext for a larger, dull question: what becomes of a society that no longer listens to its dead? Renée Ballard, at the head of the unresolved business unit in the LAPD, reopens a twenty -year -old investigation. DNA, now analyzing with new precision, reactivates the ghosts of rape that has remained unpunished. While the methods evolve, violence remains – insidious, resilient, rooted in the folds of a city which seems to have lost the taste of justice. The novelist does not seek the swarming. His writing, clear and functional, knows how to be discreet to better let the essential arise: a detail, a breathing, a social tension. The characters – Ballard, of course, but also Maddie Bosch, daughter of the essential Harry – are inhabited by deaf concern, both intimate and collective. They advance, lucid, sometimes resigned, but also inhabited by a form of faith: that that work, rigor, obstinacy end up making something just. The background is political, without ever pouring into the manifesto. The threats of the extreme right, the resentments of a fragmented America, distrust of institutions: so many elements that nourish the atmosphere, without ever weighing down the story. Because who knows how to wait is above all a novel of tension chosen, duration, patience. The thriller becomes there an art of setback, an exercise in moral endurance. It has often been said: Michael Connelly is one of the last great columnists in American real. This novel is new proof.