Review
Amazon.com
"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
Starred Review. 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 © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From AudioFile
Harry Bosch fans will be delighted to learn that neither the author nor the narrator has lost his touch. Both keep getting better and better. Connelly's no-nonsense detective is back at the LAPD after three years of retirement. He and his former partner are assigned to the "Open-Unsolved Case Squad." ("Cold Case" is too gauche for the department.) Right away they catch a hot lead via a DNA hit on an old case concerning the abduction and murder of a 16-year-old girl. Bosch's character evolves with each installment. This gives Len Cariou a lot to work with. He punctuates each character differently, so there's never any confusion about who is speaking. His sometimes gravelly voice, reminiscent of the late Rod Serling, makes Bosch's persona come to life. The plotting in this fifteenth Connelly thriller is so tight you won't figure out whodunit until Bosch does. A.L.H. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Even cynicism has a way of going stale, as so many hard-boiled authors have discovered. But what can you do to refresh the screen when your hero, like Connelly's Harry Bosch, looks at the world through "seen-it-all-twice eyes"? You can take a chance, and that's exactly what Connelly does here, transforming his world-weary hero into a rookie cop and forcing him (and us) to live one day at a time without the comfort of our own cynicism. Several books ago, Bosch walked away from the LAPD after 25 years; now he's back, having realized that "I need the gun. I need the badge. Otherwise I'm out of balance." Working with his old partner, Kiz Rider, he is assigned to the newly formed Open Unsolved Unit, dedicated to closing unsolved murders. In their first case, the 1988 shooting of a 16-year-old girl, DNA testing has established a link from the murder weapon to a suspect, but there's a lot that doesn't add up. Why weren't various leads suggesting a hate crime explored properly? Soon Bosch remembers all too well why he quit in the first place: too many cases soiled by "high jingo," that deadening, justice-defying mix of departmental politics, corruption, and cover-up. Connelly sets up a great premise here--the cop determined to reinvent himself in the face of a thoroughly recalcitrant world--and he makes the most of it. Hard-boiled fans don't like traditional commitment much (it makes us itchy), but Bosch turns us into believers. Give Connelly credit for having the courage to tinker with one of the richest characters in the genre. Bill Ott
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