Mma Ramotswe is an amazing individual which might sound funny given that she is a character of fiction. She is always above fair in her judgement of things to be done; she was once on a case where patients at a particular ward of a hospital in Botswana were dying at precisely 2pm on Friday afternoons. When she learns that the cleaning staff at 2pm clean that particular room in that ward and unplug ventilating machines in order to plug in a vacuum, her client insists the maid should be fired for causing the deaths of three people.
Ever in her wisdom, Mma Ramotswe judges that no good will come from the firing of a maid, who's husband has died and who has three children to support, for doing something she didn't even know was wrong. Wasn't it the duty of the hospital to train the cleaning staff on health code procedure, Mma Ramotswe asks?
After staying with a family who do nothing but yell at each other and cast snide remarks at one another, Mma Ramotswe was almost poisoned to death. She insists that her fee has gone up to the tone of 100,000 pula, but it's not until the end of the episode (or book) that we find out she doesn't ask for the money herself, but for the orphan farm outside of Gabarone.
When a woman comes to her certain that her husband has bought a Mercedes he knows was stolen from South Africa, the woman asks Mma Ramotswe for help. She doesn't want to turn her husband in, merely, she wants the car returned to its rightful owner so that God will know the right thing was done. Mma Ramotswe figures she will "steal" the car from her client's house, drive it across the border and give it to a police friend of hers who will return it to its rightful owner. Who, may I ask, commits such a creative crime? Only the wonderful No. 1 Lady Detective.
Harry Bosch is a damaged character, and it's for this reason that I love him. His heart is in the right place, although he makes some judgement calls that place him in charge of a person's life, instead of a court of law. He speaks for the dead because their lives were taken, and with that, their voices. He takes the matters into his heart; he doesn't just feel or handle his cases on an intellectual level, he feels them, and in this, he lives an extremely rough life.
His depth of character and emotion are nothing that I can replicate with my words, which do nothing but vaguely describe a diamond without illuminating all of its facets. At the end of the day, Harry Bosch is a man seeking justice, a bird with a broken wing but a fearsome bite, a smoker, a lover, and most of all, one who looks to right the worst of wrongs. He kick an ass and send a zinger as instinctively as he puts long-forgotten pieces of a case together, and he does none of this because of personal glory--only because it's his mission in life.
to be continued......
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