The Closers (Mass Market Paperback)

Starred Review. 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）
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Amazon.co.uk
The Closers puts Harry Bosch back in the Los Angelese Police Department, where he was meant to be, and sets him to solving old cases, which is what he always did best, alongside Kiz Rider, who was always the best of the partners fate, and Connolly, gave him. They are working on the death of a bi-racial teenager back in the 1980s, abducted from her bedroom and shot dead. The racial tensions of the time are clearly a factor - the DNA of a known racist is trapped in blood on the gun - but in a Michael Connolly novel, things are never as simple as they seem. And Bosch finds, not to his especial surprise, that he has been asked back into the LAPD as someone's weapon in the dance of departmental politics. The death of Backy Verloren was a tragedy - the investigation of her murder was a series of mistakes that left her father an alcoholic mess and her mother an obsessive trapped in the past, and someone profited by their misery. Connolly is always at his best when Harry is caught up in the problems of other people, rather than his own, and this excellent, twisty police procedural is a snappy return to form. --Roz Kaveney

Harry Bosch fans will be delighted to learn that neither the author nor the narrator has lost his touch. Both keep getting better and better. Connelly's no-nonsense detective is back at the LAPD after three years of retirement. He and his former partner are assigned to the "Open-Unsolved Case Squad." ("Cold Case" is too gauche for the department.) Right away they catch a hot lead via a DNA hit on an old case concerning the abduction and murder of a 16-year-old girl. Bosch's character evolves with each installment. This gives Len Cariou a lot to work with. He punctuates each character differently, so there's never any confusion about who is speaking. His sometimes gravelly voice, reminiscent of the late Rod Serling, makes Bosch's persona come to life. The plotting in this fifteenth Connelly thriller is so tight you won't figure out whodunit until Bosch does. A.L.H. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --Ce texte provient d'une édition qui n'est plus publiée ou qui est non diponible.