The Sonoma Valley Authors Festival 2025 (May 2-4) comes at a time when California may need a little soothing, reflection and insight after weeks of fires, storms and mudslides throughout the state - as well as a torrent of disquieting political events.

The three-day festival set in Sonoma Valley — now in its eighth year — features an all-star writers lineup that includes a spectrum of heart and expertise.

They have created a similar kind of atmosphere at their annual event, established in honor of their mothers, who both loved to read.

Sonoma Valley Authors Festival Founders David and Ginny Freeman. Photo by Bob Stender
Main image: Michael Connelly. Photo by Kat Westerman

“Whether our attendees come to the Sonoma Valley Authors Festival to listen to their favorite authors, enjoy the camaraderie of those with similar interests, or savor a weekend of immersion in learning in a beautiful setting, they go home feeling informed and transformed,” says festival co-founder, Ginny Freeman. Ginny, along with her husband David Freeman, founded the festival eight years ago. It was a mission they undertook after attending a variety of festivals and lectures - especially Sun Valley Writers' Conference - where they enjoyed the learning, the discussions and the intimate connections.

The list of presenters is long and varied — a partial sampling includes the internationally acclaimed writer Isabel Allende, maybe best known for her novels "House of the Spirits" and "City of Beasts"; Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and bestselling author Anna Quindlen; neuroscientist and best selling author Daniel Levitan who’s newest work explores the interconnectivity between music, the brain, creativity and health; and Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez, whose memoir "My Side of the River" relates her experience as an immigrant and challenges some of the myths about that community.

Among festival presenters this year is Michael Connelly, perhaps today’s foremost master of the craft of crime and mystery writing. Connelly may be best known for the character Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch — a homicide detective out of the Los Angeles Hollywood division who takes his readers with him through Los Angeles's bleak murder scenes and the attached investigations.

"Bosch" is the hit series produced by Amazon Studios and Fabrik Entertainment that may have launched Detective Harry Bosch, with actor Titus Welliver inhabiting the Bosch character, into the public imagination.Connelly is one of the series’ Executive Producers. Meanwhile he is still writing books, churning out one or two a year.

His characters are based on law enforcement personnel he met and wrote about while a journalist, first in Florida, where he grew up, and later at the Los Angeles Times. Connelly became a reporter urged on his father’s advice. "Dad said skip the English lit degree,” Connelly says. “Get a degree in journalism, get into a cop beat somewhere and get into police stations and watch the detectives.”

After working police beats in Florida, Connelly moved out to Los Angeles. “I always thought, what I loved and what made me want to be a writer, were private eye books like Ross McDonald and Raymond Chandler. I admired writers like that.”

Connelly’s police beat reporting work in Los Angeles linked precisely with that thinking. “I used what I thought other writers didn’t have.” That means showing up at ghastly and tragic crime scenes, walking along with detectives and observing their craft and methods.

Connelly's writing “is all about procedures and forensics," he says "That’s important of course, but it’s really window dressing on why people do things and how they do things - how they persevere and how they keep the darkness they see in this kind of work from getting inside and metastasizing into some kind of cancer or corruption.”

That was the thinking behind the creation of another character, Renee Ballard, also based on a real-life cop. Connelly’s first Ballard novel was published in 2017 and a series of six followed.

Connelly wanted readers to hear the voice of a woman in law enforcement who has “additional barriers and blockades just because of her gender.

“I’m not trying to be Mr. Make-Social-Statements or trying to be some kind of hero. I’m just trying to be accurate,” he says.

Maggie Q stars as Renee Ballard in the Amazon series "Bosch: Legacy" launched in 2024, based on the real-life detective Mitzi Roberts. She was one of the youngest women to become a homicide detective at the LAPD, Connelly says, and worked with Detective Tim Marcia. Both are now advisors on the series.

In November 2024, Connelly started writing an eighth novel in "The Lincoln Lawyer" — another series he has created. His protagonist, Mickey Haller, is Bosch’s half-brother, called the Lincoln lawyer for his way of doing business out of the back of his Lincoln town car.

The southern California fires prompted a recalibration of the book. Not that he was about to toss the entire manuscript, Connelly says, but he wanted to “communicate what this tragedy does to a community.”

The Los Angeles-area fires resulted in 17 deaths in Altadena. It is estimated that some 9,400 structures — homes, schools, churches and synagogues — were burned down. Residents in the Pasadena-adjacent town wonder when and if they can rebuild the community that has been remarkable for its cohesion and ethnic diversity. Meanwhile, the Palisades Fire in Los Angeles, near the coast, destroyed some 1,200 homes and businesses.

While smoke was billowing across the city, Connelly and his wife were evacuated for a night from their home in Hollywood. They returned to a home still standing, but the one in Malibu, where Connelly used to go to write, burned down.

“I hesitate to talk about it because I’m a very lucky person. It was not my main home.”

He went out to Malibu to take a look — the neighbors are gone and their houses are gone, he says. “So, I can’t sit whining about losing a house.”

The new Mickey Hallard book has to reflect that scale, is his thinking — the fires and the trauma are going to be the elephant in the room in the City and County of Los Angeles for years to come, Connelly says. "The Lincoln Lawyer" series is entering its fourth season on Netflix.

In a recent interview with Bleeding Cool News, Connelly spoke about another elephant in the room — the state of journalism and information, especially during and after a contentious election season. The giant shift to the internet business model has changed reporting and writing over the last several years and has helped destroy advertising in newspapers. Advertising supplied the financial piece that allowed for hiring reporters, editors and fact-checkers, he says. “They don’t have the resources to do what they used to do.”

“I do watch the disassembling of the media — it is at the center point of what is so divisive about this country,” he says.

→ Michael Connelly joins a host of acclaimed writers at the Sonoma Valley Authors Festival.
May 2-4, 2025