Michael Connelly is an American author of detective novels, notably those featuring LAPD Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch, named after the Dutch painter of fantasy and horror. The Black Echo, the first book featuring Bosch, won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for Best First Novel of 1992.

He has written other books outside the Bosch series, including Blood Work, which was made into a 2002 movie directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. In 2006, The Lincoln Lawyer was selected as one of ten books to feature in Richard & Judy's televised book club.

Connelly is a graduate of the University of Florida, where he earned a bachelor's degree in journalism in 1980. He decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the university. 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 graduation, he worked as a journalist 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 which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper echelons of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and landing him in the city about which Chandler, his literary hero, had written.

Other books from Connelly are The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote, 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 friend's receiving of a heart transplant and the attendant "survivor's guilt" the friend experienced, knowing that someone died in order that he have the chance to live.

Connelly has been interested and fascinated by those same feelings as expressed by the survivors of the plane crash he wrote about years before. Angels Flight was released in 1999 and was another entry in the Harry Bosch series. Void Moon, was released in 2000, and introduced a new character, Cassie Black, a high-stakes Las Vegas thief. His 2001 release, A Darkness More Than Night, united Harry Bosch with Terry McCaleb from Blood Work, and was named one of the Best Books Of 2001 by the Los Angeles Times.

He was also one of the creators, writers, and consulting producers of Level 9, a TV show about a task force fighting cyber crime that ran on UPN in the fall of 2000.

Connelly's books have won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Nero, Maltese Falcon (Japan), .38 Caliber (France), and Grand Prix (France) awards. He lives with his wife and daughter.

Selected works:

• The Black Echo, 1992
• The Black Ice, 1993
• The Concrete Blonde, 1994
• The Last Coyote, 1995
• The Poet, 1996
• Trunk Music, 1997
• Blood Work, 1998
• Angels Flight, 1999
• Void Moon, 2000
• A Darkness More Than Night, 2001
• City Of Bones, 2002
• Chasing the Dime, 2002
• Lost Light, 2003
• The Narrows, 2004
• The Lincoln Lawyer, 2005
• The Closers, 2005
• Crime Beat, 2006, collected journalism from South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Los Angeles Times
• Echo Park, 2006
• The Overlook, 2006, a serialized novella published in The New York Times Magazine, and later published as a full novel (2007)
• The Brass Verdict, 2008
• The Scarecrow, 2009