In Connelly's latest #1 "New York Times" bestseller, Harry Bosch returns to join the LAPD's new Open/Unsolved Unit and catches the case of a teenager killed more than 20 years ago. But Harry is soon navigating through a department far different from the one he left three years ago.

Reviews

Poor Harry Bosch. The new suspect in the long-ago murder of a teenaged girl is a white supremacist with ties to Bosch's very own LAPD. With an 11-city tour. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

LAPD detective Harry Bosch, hero of last year's The Narrows and other Connelly thrillers, is back on the force after a two-year retirement. Assigned to the Open Unsolved (cold cases) unit and teamed with former partner Kiz Rider, Harry's first case back involves the killing of a high school girl 17 years before, reopened because of a DNA match to blood found on the murder gun. That premise could be a formula for a routine outing, but not with Connelly. Nor does the author rely on violent action to propel his story; there's next to none. In Connelly/Bosch's world, character, context and procedure are what count, and once again the author proves a master at all. The blood on the gun belongs to a local lowlife white supremacist, Roland Mackey; the victim had a black father and a white mother. But the blood indicates only that Mackey had possession of the gun, so how to pin him to the crime? Connelly meticulously leads the reader along with Bosch and Rider as they explore the links to Mackey and along the way connect the initial investigation of the crime to a police conspiracy. Most striking of all, in developments that give this novel astonishing moral force, the pair explore the "ripples" of the long ago crime, how it has destroyed the young girl's family-leaving the mother trapped in the past and plunging the father into a nightmare of homelessness and drink-and how it drives Rider, and especially Bosch, into deeper understanding of their own purposes in life. Connelly comes as close as anyone to being today's Dostoyevsky of crime literature, and this is one of his finest novels to date, a likely candidate not only for book award nominations but for major bestsellerdom. Agent, Phillip Spitzer. Major ad/promo; 11-city author tour. (May 16) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.