Lost Light

Starred review from March 17, 2003
Award-winning former crime reporter Connelly (The Black Echo; City of Bones) hits all the right notes with this latest in his Edgar-winning mystery series featuring sax-playing L.A. detective Harry Bosch. Even though this marks the ninth outing for Harry, the principled, incorruptible investigator shows little sign of slowing in his unrelenting pursuit of justice for all. Disillusioned by his constant battle with police hypocrisy and bureaucracy, Harry quits the department after 28 years on the job. Like so many ex-cops before him, he finds retirement boring: "I was staying up late, staring at the walls and drinking too much red wine." He decides to take advantage of his newly minted private-eye license and get back to work. The case he chooses—one that he had been briefly involved in four years before—is the puzzling unsolved murder of 24-year-old Angella Benton. Angella's death is linked to the theft of $2 million from a film company foolishly employing real cash as a prop on an action-movie set. Harry patiently follows the bloody trail from Angella's violated body through the Hollywood heist to the disappearance of an FBI computer expert and the shooting of two LAPD cops. His investigation eventually leads him to the elite terrorist hunters of the new Department of Homeland Security. Few will follow every twist and turn of the labyrinthine plot, but no matter. The fun comes in watching Harry slowly and brilliantly separate the seemingly impossibly knotted strands and then knit them back into whole cloth. This exciting procedural is as good as any in the series, and Connelly's concluding coda has a kicker about Harry's private life that will draw gasps of astonishment from longtime readers. (One-day laydown Apr. 1)Forecast:All the usual marketing and promotion jams have been kicked out on this one—television, radio and print advertising; transit ads; multicity author tour; postcards; etc.—which should push it to the top of the lists. Special bonus: fans at Connelly's readings will receive a compilation CD featuring Bosch's favorite jazz tunes.

June 2, 2003
At the fade of Connelly's City of Bones, his hero, Harry Bosch, said goodbye to the Los Angeles Police Department he'd served loyally but unhappily for nine phenomenally successful novels, raising the question: what now? This new work provides the answer: Harry has embarked on a new career as a private detective. His first case involves a homicide that his LAPD superiors took away from him four years before, the still-unsolved brutal murder of a young woman that has continued to haunt him. He goes about his new business just as zealously and relentlessly as when he wore a badge, but its absence makes his job more difficult, especially when his solo sleuthing pits him against friends and foes on the LAPD, over-zealous anti-terrorist feds and a cadre of vicious killers. Connelly lets Bosch narrate the story, a somewhat hoary private eye device brought up to date by the author's compelling style. Reader Cariou, a veteran of Broadway (Sweeney Todd) and television (Law and Order; Murder She Wrote), has the timbre and talent to capture the sound and the moods of Harry: thoughtful, tough, driven yet surprisingly hopeful. His treatment of the other characters—from a raspy-voiced, paraplegic ex-cop to Bosch's disillusioned former partner Kizmin Rider—is nearly as effective. The quality of the narration plus the added production details—e.g., breaking the cassettes at chapter endings and bookending them with bluesy jazz riffs—result in an intriguing, suspenseful audio noir package, as dark and edgy as its hero-narrator. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Forecasts, Mar. 17).