He walked away from the job three years ago. But Harry Bosch cannot resist the call to join the elite Open/Unsolved Unit. His mission: solve murders whose investigations were flawed, stalled, or abandoned to L.A.'s tides of crime. With some people openly rooting for his failure, Harry catches the case of a teenager dragged off to her death on Oat Mountain, and traces the DNA on the murder weapon to a small-time criminal. But something bigger and darker beckons, and Harry must battle to fit all the pieces together. Shaking cages and rattling ghosts, he will push the rules to the limit--and expose the kind of truth that shatters lives, ends careers, and keeps the dead whispering in the night...
Amazon.com Review
"A city that forgets its murder victims is a city lost. This is where we don't forget," Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch is told by his new boss, as he ends a three-year retirement and rejoins the Los Angeles Police Department at the start of The Closers, the 11th installment of Michael Connelly's Edgar-winning series. Having long ago demonstrated his knack for cracking previously unsolved homicides, Bosch is assigned to the newly re-branded Open-Unsolved Unit (aka "cold case" squad), and charged with resolving the 17-year-old abduction and slaying of a mixed-race teenager.
Rebecca Verloren, 16, was discovered missing from her Chatsworth home on a July morning in 1988. Her corpse and the gun that ended her life were later found on a hill behind the house. An autopsy revealed that she'd recently undergone an abortion, and a piece of skin tissue--presumably the killer's--was found trapped inside the murder weapon. Only now, though, has DNA science matched that tissue to Roland Mackey, a dyslexic 35-year-old tow-truck operator with no obvious connection to the deceased. It's up to Bosch, once more partnered with Kizmin Rider, to determine whether Mackey offed Becky Verloren, or was at least an accessory to that tragedy. But the more Bosch and Rider dig into this dusty crime, trying in part to determine whether racial animosity might have been involved, the more pain and resistance they encounter. Becky's white mother maintains the teen's old bedroom as a shrine, while her shattered father, an African-American chef, has vanished into LA's homeless community. Of the two original investigators on the case, one has since committed suicide, and Bosch suspects that the other--now a police commander--is helping to keep the lid tight on some old departmental secrets, perhaps linked to our hero's nemesis, Deputy Chief Irvin S. Irving.
Understandably rusty after three years sans shield, Bosch makes his share of personal and professional mistakes here--including one that supplies The Closers with a lethal, plot-turning climax. But the greater problem is that Connelly exhausts so much time and effort following his protagonist through the tedium of modern police procedures, that he neglects what readers have liked more about this series in the past: its persistently deft exploration of Bosch's lonely, haunted soul (which remains mostly out of sight in this tale), and the author's frequent flights of lyrical prose (also not much in evidence). Would-be novelists wanting an example of a solidly constructed cop tale need look no further than The Closers. But readers hoping to learn why Connelly is so well-respected in this genre should turn, instead, to previous Bosch titles such as The Concrete Blonde, Angel's Flight, or City of Bones. --J. Kingston Pierce
Description:
He walked away from the job three years ago. But Harry Bosch cannot resist the call to join the elite Open/Unsolved Unit. His mission: solve murders whose investigations were flawed, stalled, or abandoned to L.A.'s tides of crime. With some people openly rooting for his failure, Harry catches the case of a teenager dragged off to her death on Oat Mountain, and traces the DNA on the murder weapon to a small-time criminal. But something bigger and darker beckons, and Harry must battle to fit all the pieces together. Shaking cages and rattling ghosts, he will push the rules to the limit--and expose the kind of truth that shatters lives, ends careers, and keeps the dead whispering in the night...
Amazon.com Review
"A city that forgets its murder victims is a city lost. This is where we don't forget," Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch is told by his new boss, as he ends a three-year retirement and rejoins the Los Angeles Police Department at the start of The Closers, the 11th installment of Michael Connelly's Edgar-winning series. Having long ago demonstrated his knack for cracking previously unsolved homicides, Bosch is assigned to the newly re-branded Open-Unsolved Unit (aka "cold case" squad), and charged with resolving the 17-year-old abduction and slaying of a mixed-race teenager.
Rebecca Verloren, 16, was discovered missing from her Chatsworth home on a July morning in 1988. Her corpse and the gun that ended her life were later found on a hill behind the house. An autopsy revealed that she'd recently undergone an abortion, and a piece of skin tissue--presumably the killer's--was found trapped inside the murder weapon. Only now, though, has DNA science matched that tissue to Roland Mackey, a dyslexic 35-year-old tow-truck operator with no obvious connection to the deceased. It's up to Bosch, once more partnered with Kizmin Rider, to determine whether Mackey offed Becky Verloren, or was at least an accessory to that tragedy. But the more Bosch and Rider dig into this dusty crime, trying in part to determine whether racial animosity might have been involved, the more pain and resistance they encounter. Becky's white mother maintains the teen's old bedroom as a shrine, while her shattered father, an African-American chef, has vanished into LA's homeless community. Of the two original investigators on the case, one has since committed suicide, and Bosch suspects that the other--now a police commander--is helping to keep the lid tight on some old departmental secrets, perhaps linked to our hero's nemesis, Deputy Chief Irvin S. Irving.
Understandably rusty after three years sans shield, Bosch makes his share of personal and professional mistakes here--including one that supplies The Closers with a lethal, plot-turning climax. But the greater problem is that Connelly exhausts so much time and effort following his protagonist through the tedium of modern police procedures, that he neglects what readers have liked more about this series in the past: its persistently deft exploration of Bosch's lonely, haunted soul (which remains mostly out of sight in this tale), and the author's frequent flights of lyrical prose (also not much in evidence). Would-be novelists wanting an example of a solidly constructed cop tale need look no further than The Closers. But readers hoping to learn why Connelly is so well-respected in this genre should turn, instead, to previous Bosch titles such as The Concrete Blonde, Angel's Flight, or City of Bones. --J. Kingston Pierce
From Publishers Weekly
Connelly's bruised but unbeaten crime buster, Harry Bosch, is back in harness at the Los Angeles Police Department after a two-book retirement (Lost Light, The Narrows) during which he sought justice as a private eye. Luckily, reader Cariou has returned with him. Cariou's deep, dry and slightly mournful delivery proved a perfect match for Bosch's moody first-person PI narration. With Connelly reverting to the third-person format he prefers for his hero's police procedural cases, Cariou opts for a more objective, faster-paced, just-the-facts-ma'am approach to the descriptive passages, smoothly slipping back into Bosch-voice for the book's abundant dialogue sequences. Finding the right nuances for that voice is a tougher job this go-round, since Harry is in a state of constant emotional flux. He's happy to be back on the force, working with his former partner Kiz Rider and, for the first time, for men he respects, but he's not sure he can adjust to the new, streamlined LAPD. Cariou effectively enacts a large, carefully crafted cast of suspects, victims and cops, maneuvering easily past ethnic and sexist vocal land mines. Judiciously placed blues and jazz riffs add the finishing touches to this solid audio production. Bonus features include Connelly explaining Bosch's return to the LAPD, plus his reading of a chapter from his next novel, The Lincoln Lawyer, featuring Bosch's half-brother.
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