the midsomer conundrum

One thing that can be a problem with series crime fiction is the Midsomer Conundrum: a protagonist will get involved in a crazily colourful set of adventures over time. How a character fits into this bloody world is an issue different writers deal with differently, and differently well. There is one series I cannot go back to, even though I otherwise enjoyed the three I have read over the years, because in every case the crime was somehow linked to the hero, and not for reasons growing out of the specifics of the crime, but just for coincidental reasons - he was the only person who could solve the crime because his daughter happened to witness something, for instance.

I am reading my first Michael Connelly. (Annoyingly, even though I looked at the list of titles and picked the top one on the list in the jacket, so I would start at the beginning, I picked the most recent. I normally check date as well. Whatever.) I am coming to it late. Obviously, a lot of stuff has happened to Bosch and his partner Rider in previous novels. There is a genre-classic passage early on where these things are dealt with for newbies. Here is how it goes, in realtime:

'I think it's better that all the families know and we clear all the cases. It's like with my sister. We wanted to know.'
When Rider was a teenager her older sister was murdered in a drive-by shooting. The case was cleared and three bangers went away for it. It was the main reason she became a cop.
'It's probably like you with your mother, too,' she added.
Bosch looked up at her. His mother had been murdered when he was a boy. More than three decades later he solved the crime himself because he wanted to know.