Terrell "Terry" McCaleb
Created by Michael Connelly

TERRY McCALEB is a former FBI man who has had a change of heart - literally. At the start of Blood Work (1998), it is just two months after he received a life saving heart transplant. Now he is recuperating on his boat The Following Sea in the Cabrillo Marina near Los Angeles. He takes dozens of pills twice a day to keep his body from rejecting the new heart, including Prednisone which makes his beard grow so fast he has to shave twice a day. He is trying to decide what to do with his second chance at life, when a woman shows up at his boat to ask his help. She turns out to be the sister of the woman who 'donated' his new heart.

By the second book in the series, A Darkness More Than Light (2001), Terry is newly married, has a new baby daughter, has moved his boat to Catalina Island and is recovering well. He can't earn any money though, or he will lose the subsidy that pays for his life maintaining medication. He has an aptly named friend and neighbor named Buddy who provides equal parts help and complicating interference with whom he runs a charter fishing service. McCaleb doesn't quite fit the hard-hitting, hard-drinking mold of the private investigator, but Connelly really pulls off this fresh take on ex-FBI investigators.

Interesting to note: the second book in this series McCaleb spends his time investigating Harry Bosch (Connelly's more famous series character), who learns of the investigation through a leak to a tabloid reporter (Jack McEvoy, protagonist of Connelly's The Poet).

In 2002, Blood Work was brought to the big screen, with Clint Eastwood as star, director and producer. although (of course) there were changes made to the original source, the film was quite successful, both critically and commercially.

EVIDENCE

• "You have to remember something. It was never me alone. I had partners, I had the lab teams, I had the whole bureau behind me. It's a lot different than one guy running around out there on his own."
  (McCaleb, in Blood Work, explaining why he won't get involved in a murder investigation.)

SHORT STORIES

• "Cielo Azul" (2001)
  In A Darkness More Than Night, Terry and Harry Bosch speak of a case they worked together many years before which still seems to haunt them both. This is that story, available only through Connelly's mailing list.

NOVELS

• Blood Work (1998) . Buy this book
• A Darkness More Than Light (2001) . Buy this book

FILMS

• BLOOD WORK . Buy this DVD . Buy this video
  (2002, Warner Bros.)
  108 minutes
  Based on the novel by Michael Connelly
  Screenplay by Brian Helgeland
  Directed by Clint Eastwood
  Cinematography by Tom Stern
  Produced by Clint Eastwood
  Co-producer: Judie G. Hoyt
  Executive producer: Robert Lorenz
  Starring Clint Eastwood as TERRY McCALEB
  Also starring Jeff Daniels, Anjelica Huston, Wanda De Jesus, Tina Lifford, Paul Rodriguez , Dylan Walsh, Mason Lucero, Gerry Becker, Rick Hoffman

Respectfully submitted by Dale Stoyer.