When LAPD cop Hieronymus or Harry Bosch got into trouble with the Hong Kong police, he called in his lawyer Mickey Haller.
Nothing unusual about that, except that Mickey Haller and Harry Bosch are both characters in Michael Connelly’s novels. (Mickey Haller made his first appearance in Connelly’s book The Lincoln Lawyer. In fact, Haller and Bosch are half brothers.)
So authors are now into cross-selling too huh?
It becomes interesting when an author makes references to characters in another author’s books.
Michael Connelly’s hero Harry Bosch and Robert Crais’ hero Elvis Cole both live in the same location in LA.
Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch makes an un-billed but hardly-unrecognizable cameo in Robert Crais’ The Last Detective, and Michael Connelly returns the favor in his Lost Light.
Reed interracial half-brothers who played minor roles in 2008’s Bones, take center stage in bestseller Kellerman’s routine 24th Alex Delaware novel, True Detectives.
The Kellerman family is a writing family, referred to as “the Kellerman family writing conglomerate”, wife Faye, son Jesse and now even teenage daughter Aliza are all novelists and occasionally they make cross references to each other’s characters.
It becomes interesting when you notice such things.
But you won’t unless you read all their books.