The Closers (Harry Bosch)
by Michael Connelly
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael ConnellyEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-02-01
ISBN: 0446616443
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780446616447
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of The Closers (Harry Bosch)
Book Review: One of his best; Very satisfying
Summary: 5 Stars
Michael Connelly is frankly becoming a phenomenon, one of the best detective novelists the genre has ever had. His Harry Bosch series has now got three books which are among my favorite detective novels: the two besides this one are The Concrete Blonde and Angel's Flight. He also wrote several other novels, notably Blood Work and The Poet (also possibly Void Moon) which are truly great novels, though they're not part of tbe Bosch series.
This latest installment in the Bosch series has an interesting pedigree. The author apparently is very aware of local politics and current events. Our Los Angeles police department has been wracked by morale problems in the last few years, right up until William Bratton, the current chief, took over the job. Apparently many officers in the department had resigned in disgust at the politics of the previous chief and the way he ran things. Connelly fictionalizes all of this, but has Bosch resign from the department and begin to work as a private investigator. When you bought the last book, The Narrows, in hardback, you got a CD with it titled Blue Neon Night, which included video of various locations around LA, and William Peterson (from CSI on TV) reading passages from Connelly's novels. There's a brief epilogue to the CD, which includes a portion of a speech Chief Bratton made at the Police Academy with Connelly in attendance. In the speech, Bratton invited Bosch, Connelly's fictional detective, to return to the department under his amnesty program, where officers who had retired had a certain length of time to rejoin the department. This book, in which Bosch has returned, is the result.
Connelly now has Bosch working in a division of Robbery/Homicide downtown. The old name for the unit was Cold Case, but the chief didn't like the name: as far as he's concerned, there's always someone for whom the case isn't ever "cold", and thinks the name sends the wrong message. He's renamed the unit Open/Unsolved, and Bosch not only gets to work in the unit, he's partnered with Kizmin Rider, his black lesbian partner from a few books ago, the only cop he's worked with really well during the length of the series.
Their first case involves the murder of a high school girl, killed in a bizarre fashion by person or persons unknown, and left in the hills behind her house. The killing has destroyed the family (the father wandered off and is now homeless, the mother is living in a fog) and no one's ever really forgotten the victim. Harry and Kizmin have a clue unavailable to the detectives involved in the case 17 years ago: the gun that was used in the killing had (by a quirk of fate) a tendency to "bite" the person firing it, and take a small bit of skin when it did this. The skin was useless when the killing occurred, but now they have used DNA and come up with a new suspect, and so the investigation can restart.
I really enjoyed this book. Connelly knows Los Angeles as only someone who loves the city can. From the places to eat downtown (and the prices you pay there: he knows the Pacific Dining Car's expensive) to the atmosphere, pretty much everything's accurate and believable. The ending is satisfying, not quite the puzzle solution of The Concrete Blonde, not quite the poetry of The Poet, but very very good anyway, and everything's quite well done. I really recommend this book.
Summary of The Closers (Harry Bosch)
He walked away from the job three years ago. But Harry Bosch cannot resist the call to join the elite Open/Unsolved Unit. His mission: solve murders whose investigations were flawed, stalled, or abandoned to L.A.'s tides of crime. With some people openly rooting for his failure, Harry catches the case of a teenager dragged off to her death on Oat Mountain, and traces the DNA on the murder weapon to a small-time criminal. But something bigger and darker beckons, and Harry must battle to fit all the pieces together. Shaking cages and rattling ghosts, he will push the rules to the limit-and expose the kind of truth that shatters lives, ends careers, and keeps the dead whispering in the night...."A city that forgets its murder victims is a city lost. This is where we don't forget," Detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch is told by his new boss, as he ends a three-year retirement and rejoins the Los Angeles Police Department at the start of The Closers, the 11th installment of Michael Connelly's Edgar-winning series. Having long ago demonstrated his knack for cracking previously unsolved homicides, Bosch is assigned to the newly re-branded Open-Unsolved Unit (aka "cold case" squad), and charged with resolving the 17-year-old abduction and slaying of a mixed-race teenager.
Rebecca Verloren, 16, was discovered missing from her Chatsworth home on a July morning in 1988. Her corpse and the gun that ended her life were later found on a hill behind the house. An autopsy revealed that she'd recently undergone an abortion, and a piece of skin tissue--presumably the killer's--was found trapped inside the murder weapon. Only now, though, has DNA science matched that tissue to Roland Mackey, a dyslexic 35-year-old tow-truck operator with no obvious connection to the deceased. It's up to Bosch, once more partnered with Kizmin Rider, to determine whether Mackey offed Becky Verloren, or was at least an accessory to that tragedy. But the more Bosch and Rider dig into this dusty crime, trying in part to determine whether racial animosity might have been involved, the more pain and resistance they encounter. Becky's white mother maintains the teen's old bedroom as a shrine, while her shattered father, an African-American chef, has vanished into LA's homeless community. Of the two original investigators on the case, one has since committed suicide, and Bosch suspects that the other--now a police commander--is helping to keep the lid tight on some old departmental secrets, perhaps linked to our hero's nemesis, Deputy Chief Irvin S. Irving.
Understandably rusty after three years sans shield, Bosch makes his share of personal and professional mistakes here--including one that supplies The Closers with a lethal, plot-turning climax. But the greater problem is that Connelly exhausts so much time and effort following his protagonist through the tedium of modern police procedures, that he neglects what readers have liked more about this series in the past: its persistently deft exploration of Bosch's lonely, haunted soul (which remains mostly out of sight in this tale), and the author's frequent flights of lyrical prose (also not much in evidence). Would-be novelists wanting an example of a solidly constructed cop tale need look no further than The Closers. But readers hoping to learn why Connelly is so well-respected in this genre should turn, instead, to previous Bosch titles such as The Concrete Blonde, Angel's Flight, or City of Bones. --J. Kingston Pierce
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