In Los Angeles in 1998, a 16 year old girl who had disappeared from her home was later found dead with a single gunshot wound to the chest. The death appeared at first to be a suicide, and although detectives on the case found clues that pointed toward murder, no one was ever charged. Detective Larry Bosch, newly returned to the LAPD with the job of closing unsolved cases, gets the report of a new DNA match that makes the case very much alive again. A white supremacist with close ties to the LAPD becomes a suspect but Bosch and his partner, Kizmin Rider, can't take a step without threatening higher ups in the department.

And the case turns out to be anything but cold. Everywhere he probes, Bosch finds hot grief, hot rage, and a bottomless well of treachery and danger. Enemies inside the department make Bosch wonder if he's been allowed to rejoin the LAPD only because they needed a fresh victim.

The Closers

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
In The Closers, 25-year LAPD veteran Harry Bosch comes back to the force after 3 years of retirement. This time, he and his partner, Kiz Rider, are working in "Open Unsolved," a top-notch homicide unit that applies new technology and cutting-edge investigative techniques to closed cases. Formed during Harry's retirement, the unit offers the victims of crime and their families one more shot at justice, but as the detectives working these cases know, time is not on their side. The evidence (such as it is) is old, and the leads are far from fresh.

Harry's first assignment involves a cold hit on a DNA sample from an unsolved 1988 crime: the disappearance and subsequent murder of a lovely 16-year-old girl. From the first it's clear that the original detectives on the scene missed vital clues, and Bosch doesn't win any points by criticizing their mistakes. Fortunately, he has always cared more about justice than popularity; and as the fascinatingly complex investigation unfolds, he is determined to make things right -- even if that means hanging his fellow cops out to dry. Sue Stone

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"In Los Angeles in 1988, a sixteen-year-old girl disappeared from her home and was later found dead of a gunshot wound to the chest. The death appeared at first to be a suicide - but some of the evidence contradicted that scenario, and detectives came to believe this was in fact a murder. Despite a by-the-book investigation, no one was ever charged." "Now Detective Harry Bosch is back with the LAPD with the sole mission of closing unsolved cases, and this girl's death is the first he's given. A DNA match makes the case very much alive again, and it turns out to be anything but cold. The ripples from this death have destroyed at least two other lives, and everywhere he probes, Bosch finds hot grief, hot rage, and a bottomless well of betrayal and malice." And it's not just the girl's family and friends whose lives Bosch is stirring up afresh. With each new development, Harry Bosch finds increasing resistance from within the police force itself. Old enemies are close at hand. Even as he pushes relentlessly to find the truth, Bosch has to wonder if this assignment was intended to be his last. Digging up the past may heal old wounds - or it may expose new, searing ones.

FROM THE CRITICS

Jonathan Yardley - The Washington Post

Connelly, a former reporter on newspapers in Florida and Los Angeles who went straight and started writing fiction about two decades ago, is the real thing: an immensely skilled entertainer who has mastered the requirements and expectations of his genre but also from time to time rises above them. Chandler self-evidently is his muse and occasionally the influence is a bit too blatant, but Connelly writes grown-up novels that -- along with work by the likes of Scott Turow, Elmore Leonard and John Grisham -- remind us that the place to look for serious American fiction is not in the schools of creative writing but out there in the real world.

Janet Maslin - The New York Times

Like James Ellroy and John Fante, both of whose work is referred to here, Mr. Connelly continues to make his doomy, secretive Los Angeles a living, breathing character in his stories.

Publishers Weekly

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.

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