Just finished The Closers by Michael Connelly. This is Book 11 in the Harry Bosch series. It was released in 2005. It is, essentially, a series reboot that brings Bosch back into the LAPD and returns to Connelly’s classic third person narrative style. Here is the blurb for the book —
After three years out of the LAPD, Harry Bosch returns, to find the department a different place from the one he left. A new Police Chief has been brought over from New York to give the place a thorough clean up from top to bottom. Working with his former partner, Kiz Rider, Harry is assigned to the department’s Open-Unsolved Unit, working on the thousands of cold cases that haunt the LAPD’s files. These detectives are the Closers — they put a shovel in the dirt and turn over the past. By applying new techniques to old evidence they aim to unearth some hidden killers and bring them to justice, for “a city that forgets its murder victims is a city lost.”
Harry and Kiz are given a politically sensitive case when a DNA match connects a white supremacist to the 1988 murder of Rebecca Verloren, a sixteen-year-old girl. Becky was of mixed race, and the case appears to have a racial angle. This was LA before the riots and Rodney King; the city was a powder keg waiting for a match. The detectives who worked the case all those years ago seem to have done a decent job, but something doesn’t fit.
Meanwhile Harry’s nemesis, Deputy Chief Irving, is watching him. In the new “clean” LAPD Irving has been sidelined to a meaningless job. Compelled by vengeance, he hopes that Harry will make a slip.
As always, Connelly features key places in Los Angeles to ground the story. One place that stood out for me were the scenes in Union Station. As Bosch and his partner are leaving the station, the see the sundial with the inscription below. Beside that is a video with Connelly doing a short tour of the some places from the story and reading an excerpt from The Closers by Michael Connelly —
Vision to See
Sundial Inscription, Union Station Los Angeles
Faith To Believe
Courage To Do