How Does Ironwood End And Why Does It Matter?

Ironwood ends by ripping away the quiet facade of Catalina Island and revealing the mess and grief underneath. That twist at the end is far more significant than solving the mystery of who did what to whom. The book begins with Stilwell and his deputies trying to catch an airdrop of contraband at midnight, and it goes very wrong. A deputy is killed, another is seriously wounded, and the resulting police investigation which follows is at the same time a formal probe and a deeply personal one for Stilwell. Most of the rest of the book follows as Stilwell investigates a seemingly unrelated clue to a mystery from 20 years ago – a backpack belonging to a missing hiker. What he finds leads him across the channel to Renée Ballard and the cold cases of LAPD’s Open Unsolved Murder Unit. The two story lines converge in a moral investigation of justice which does resolve central confrontations but leaves some of the formal reckonings with perpetrators open. And that is as it should be. All in all, reviews and commentary have highlighted the sense of purpose which is combined with an unsettling quality to the ending of Ironwood. But also what this ending does to Stilwell. Up until now, the readers have seen him in the isolated environs of the island pursue the smaller time crooks. But here he is forced to make choices between his department’s strict rules and his own justice-seeking nature, and to ponder the consequences of his choices with the aim of minimizing harm to as many people as possible. In short, this is a very different kind of book from the usual solid procedural, and it leaves a lot of questions open for future books. Also, for readers who demand and expect to be given neat and tied-up endings to the mysteries they read, it may well be very frustrating. However, for the others, I believe that the way Connelly investigates the difference between law and justice here, and shows how interrogating that difference yields stories of great depth and longevity, will be very satisfying.

The ending to Ironwood by Michael Connelly is significant in that he chooses to go for moral tension as opposed to tie everything up neatly for his reader. This means that instead of a simple recounting of the details for the midnight stakeout that went sour and resulted in the death of a deputy, along with the connection to the missing hiker that Stilwell had been working, and how he ultimately works with Renee Ballard to put away the guilty parties, Connelly allows us to see the inner struggle that the protagonist is going through as he grapples with how to do his job as a police officer versus how he feels he should be doing his job in order to be a good police officer. It’s a powerful moment for Stilwell and it gives the reader a great deal of insight into his character, and it’s how he is going to grow from this experience that is so important to understanding Stilwell going forward. In the end it doesn’t matter who wins in the court room, what matters is the type of police officer that Stilwell has become as a result of this experience and that is a stubbornly, unsettiling note to leave the reader with.

My greatest admiration for “Ironwood” is the way Connelly has left several big questions unresolved at the end of the book. All the plot mechanics, the airdrop gone wrong, the deputy killed, the lost backpack with connection to an old case, all work to drive a tight and very tense ending to the book. But it is not given to us in a simple trial-and-verdict package. Instead we are left to ponder the impacts of the events of “Ironwood” through the character of Stilwell. Will he be Subject of an Inquiry? Does he keep at it on his own? Will he find some sort of team up with Renée Ballard? And in the end, what were the impacts on him and those around him of his so grueling endeavors to uncover truth in a difficult case? From my point of view, what makes this structure work and be so urgent and not just surprising is that it is realistic. There are always big impacts from any case, often that a person would have liked to see another person held accountable for their actions is not possible, even when justice has been served, because of some technicality or for other complex and even questionable reasons. In Stilwell’s end, he has been tested and found wanting in some ways. He has been compromised in others. But in all events, he has grown so much as a character and is now even more deeply and complicatedly entrenched in the cast of characters that move about in the city of Los Angeles in all of the other books by Connelly. And so, there is so much promise of further consequences to this island story and characters, and all of that within the much greater universe of Connelly’s characters.