Spinning Brass Into Gold: An Intimate Evening with Author Michael Connelly

Join renowned author Michael Connelly for an intimate evening at The Studio@620 to benefit the Studio's educational initiatives.

"Spinning Brass into Gold with Writer Michael Connelly" At 7pm. Structured around the book, The Brass Verdict, with selected films, readings, and talk back. Introduction by Collette Bancroft, the St. Petersburg Times Book Editor. Cost is $30. 620 First Avenue South, 727-895-6620

The Studio@620 invites you to join renowned author Michael Connelly for an intimate evening to benefit the Studio's educational initiatives.  Your paid admission to this event not only gives you access to one of the greatest mystery writers of our time, but you will also receive a copy of the newly released thriller "The Brass Verdict".   Beyond that you will have helped to support The Studio@620's educational initiatives, bringing art, theater, and literature to local youth.

 

"The Brass Verdict" in Review

“Bestseller Connelly delivers one of his most intricate plots to date in his 20th book, a beautifully executed crime thriller. When L.A. lawyer Mickey Haller, last seen in The Lincoln Lawyer (2005), inherits the practice and caseload of a fellow defense attorney, Jerry Vincent, who's been murdered, the high-profile double-homicide case against famed Hollywood producer Walter Elliot, accused of shooting his wife and her alleged lover, takes top priority. As Haller scrambles to build a defense, he butts heads with LAPD Det. Harry Bosch, the stalwart hero of Connelly's long-running series (The Black Echo, etc.), who's working Vincent's murder. When Haller realizes that the Elliot affair is bigger
than simply a jealous husband killing his cheating wife, he and Bosch grudgingly agree to work together to solve what could be the biggest case in both their careers. Bosch might have met his match in the wily Haller, and readers will delight in their sparring." -- Starred Review/Publishers Weekly

“Clever plotting, numerous twists, satisfying yet surprising endings and crystal clear writing. If you are already a fan, [Connelly’s] twentieth book will satisfy like a case of your favorite treat. If you've been living in a cave and have never tried a Connelly novel, dive in— you'll love it.”—Deadly Pleasures

About the Author

While he was attending the University of Florida, Michael Connelly decided to become
a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler. He chose a major in journalism and
a minor in creative writing. Time would prove he'd major in and become a master of both.
After graduating in 1980, he worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale,
primarily on the crime beat, during the height of the wave of murder and violence that
rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. Then, in 1986, he and two other
reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. Their story on
the crash was short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, and it raised Connelly's profile
as a first-rate journalist. Talent doesn't sit idle for long, and soon after, Connelly headed west to
Los Angeles — to Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles — where he landed a prized job as a
crime reporter at the Los Angeles Times.

There's no way he could have known then just how fateful a move this was. Just three
years into the job covering crime in L.A., Connelly set to work on The Black Echo, the first of
many novels to feature LAPD detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch. Published in 1992, the
book won an Edgar Award for Best First Novel and raised Connelly's profile again, this time as
a first-rate author. His debut novel was partly based on a crime that occurred in Los Angeles
around the time of his early days at the Los Angeles Times.

Connelly followed up his first novel with three more Harry Bosch books, The Black Ice, The
Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote, before going on to write The Poet in 1996 — a thriller
with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist. In 1997, he returned to Bosch with Trunk Music,
and in 1998, he offered fans another nonseries thriller, Blood Work. It was inspired in part by a
friend's heart transplant and the attendant survivor's guilt he experienced, knowing that someone
had to die in order that he could live. Connelly had witnessed this response before in the
survivors of the plane crash he had written about years before. Blood Work was released in
2002 as a major motion picture directed by and starring Clint Eastwood. Even though Eastwood
made significant changes to the plot, it still made Connelly's day to have worked with one of his
longtime idols. He then went on to write Angels Flight (1999), the nonseries novel Void
Moon (2000), about a high-stakes Las Vegas thief, and A Darkness More Than Night (2001),
which united Harry Bosch with Terry McCaleb from Blood Work and was named one of the
Best Books of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. And then there were two in one year: City of
Bones (2002) and the stand-alone thriller Chasing the Dime, which was also named one of the
Best Books of the Year by the Los Angeles Times. Lost Light (2003) followed and was the first
Bosch book written from the first-person perspective. The Narrows (2004), which revealed Connelly's unfinished business with the villain in The Poet , was his tenth Bosch novel.

In 2005, Connelly delivered two #1 bestsellers: his eleventh Bosch novel, The Closers (May 2005), and The Lincoln Lawyer (October 2005), his first-ever legal thriller, both debuting at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.  In 2006, Michael Connelly had three offerings: His first nonfiction book, Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops & Killers, was published in May 2006. Connelly's twelfth Harry Bosch novel, Echo Park, was released in October 2006, and won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category. And the serialization of The Overlook, an original Harry Bosch novella,
was published in the New York Times Magazine's"Funny Pages," and ran every Sunday for 16 weeks.
Michael rewrote The Overlook as a novel (May 2007) with new, never-before published material. His next novel, The Brass Verdict, will be published on October 14, 2008, and features both Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller from The Lincoln Lawyer.

Connelly's books have sold more than 45 million
copies worldwide, and have been translated into 35 languages.