The Closers

July 11, 2005
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. Simultaneous release with Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 4).

Starred review from April 4, 2005
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.

January 1, 2005
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 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 15, 2005
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2005, American Library Association.)