The Wrong Side of Goodbye

October 3, 2016
Bestseller Connolly’s canny detective, Harry Bosch, remains a compelling lead, but even longtime fans may feel that his creator gives him a few too many fortuitous breaks in his 21st outing (after 2015’s The Crossing). Bosch’s long career with the LAPD is a thing of the past, and he now divides his time between PI work and pro bono service as a reserve police officer for the city of San Fernando. He gets involved in an apparently impossible case for an extremely wealthy client, Whitney Vance, who pays Bosch $10,000 just to agree to a meeting. The 85-year-old Vance asks Bosch to find out, in complete secrecy, what became of the woman Vance impregnated 65 years earlier and who disappeared from his life almost immediately afterward. The billionaire, who believes he is nearing his end, hopes the investigator can ascertain whether he has a living heir. Though the trail is beyond cold, Bosch lucks into a solid lead. The multiple contrivances significantly diminish the plot. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary.

January 30, 2017
Welliver, who portrays protagonist Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch in the Amazon Prime TV adaptation of Connelly’s series, clearly has no problem embodying the tough, almost obsessively dedicated Southern California crime fighter. But the actor’s previous work in supporting roles serve him equally well when dealing with the other characters that inhabit Harry’s literary landscape. Prominent among them in Bosch #21 is reclusive octogenarian billionaire Whitney Vance. In a voice soft and croaky with age and infirmity, he hires Harry as a private detective to find out if he has a living heir from an affair 65 years before. Simultaneously, at the San Fernando PD—where the former LAPD sleuth is stationed as an unpaid reserve officer working under a slow-talking sympathetic police chief and a captain whose speech suggests suspicion and animosity—Harry is assigned the investigation of the Screen Cutter serial rapist. The two cases remain separate, pulling Harry in two directions and introducing him to fellow cops, young and old witnesses, male and female persons of interest, and two very different villains (the smarmy rapist and a sophisticated murderer), all enacted with apparent ease by the versatile Welliver. A Little, Brown hardcover.

October 15, 2016
Harry Bosch, balancing a new pair of gigs in greater LA, tackles two cases, one of them official, one he struggles to keep as private as can be.Now that he's settled the lawsuit he brought against the LAPD for having forced him into retirement, Harry (The Crossing, 2015, etc.) is working as an unsalaried, part-time reservist for the San Fernando Police Department while keeping his license as a private investigator. Just as the San Fernando force is decimated by the layoffs that made Harry such an attractive hire, it's confronted with a serious menace: the Screen Cutter, a serial rapist with a bizarre penchant for assaulting women during the most fertile days of their menstrual cycles. Ordinarily Harry would jump at the chance to join officers Bella Lourdes and Danny Sisto in tracking down the Screen Cutter, and he does offer one or two promising suggestions. But he's much more intent on the private job he's taken for 85-year-old engineering czar Whitney Vance, who wants him to find Vibiana Duarte, the Mexican girl he impregnated when he was a USC student, and her child, who'd be well past middle age by now--and also wants him to keep his inquiries absolutely secret. Harry's admirably dogged sleuthing soon reveals what became of Vibiana and her child, but his discovery is less interesting and challenging than his attempts to report back to his client, who doesn't answer his private phone even as everyone around Harry is demanding information about the case he doesn't feel he can share. Grade-A Connelly. The dark forces arrayed against the hero turn out to be disappointingly toothless, but everything else clicks in this latest chapter of a compulsively good cop's odyssey through the City of Angels and its outlying neighborhoods and less angelic spirits.

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Starred review from October 15, 2016
Harry Bosch has jumped from being an LAPD cop to an exLAPD cop multiple times throughout the long run of this acclaimed series, but now it appears he's hung up his shield for good, given his latest acrimonious exit and the suit he's brought against the department. Harry's still working, though, both as a volunteer at a suburban cop shop and as a PI, but he's very picky about his cases, which is why when a billionaire of dubious reputation comes calling, Harry is leery. But the mogul, nearing death, has a compelling story to tell: a dalliance with a Latina student decades ago may have produced a child, who may or not still be alive but who may have produced a grandchild. Harry's job is to determine if there is an heir and then to report only to the mogul, not to any of his greedy underlings. The first part goes relatively easilyyes, there is an heirbut the reporting part, not so much, as the mogul is murdered before Harry has a chance to talk to him. Juggling his investigation with the responsibilities of his volunteer gig, now focused on trying to catch a serial rapist, Harry finds himself caught between the sometimes contradictory demands of finding bad guys and helping victims. Unlike so many authors of long-running series, Connelly continues to discover new depths to his character and new stories to tell that reveal those depths in always compelling ways. Hats off one more time to a landmark crime series.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Harry Bosch is almost as big a success on TV as he is in print, and the resulting shock wave of promotional opportunities continues to reverberate.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

June 15, 2016

So big that Hachette allowed him a one-hour booth takeover at BookExpo America, Connelly returns with another tale featuring redoubtable detective Harry Bosch. No plot details yet, but note that 2015's The Crossing had the most preorders of any Connelly title ever. With a 550,000-copy first printing.

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