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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Apr 2002, 464 pages
Paperback:
Feb 2003, 448 pages
On New Year's Day, Detective Harry Bosch fields a call that a dog has found a bone--a bone that the dog's owner, a doctor, feels certain is human.
On New Year's Day, Detective Harry Bosch fields a call that a dog has found a bone--a bone that the dog's owner, a doctor, feels certain is a human bone.
Bosch investigates, and that chance discovery leads him to a shallow grave in the Hollywood hills, evidence of a murder committed more than twenty years earlier. It's a cold case, but it stirs up Bosch's memories of his own childhood as an orphan in the city. He can't let it go. Digging through police reports and hospital records, tracking down street kids and runaways from the 1970s, Bosch finds a family ripped apart by an absence--and a trail, ever more tenuous, into a violent, terrifying world.
As the case takes Bosch deeper into the past, a rookie cop named Julia Brasher brings him alive in the present in a way no one has in years. Bosch has been warned about the trouble that comes with dating a rookie, but no warning could withstand the heat between them--or prepare Bosch for the explosions when the case takes a hard turn. A suspect bolts, a cop is shot, and suddenly Bosch's cold case has all of L.A. in an uproar--and Bosch fighting to keep control in a lawless and brutal showdown.
Drawing on the "precision-tooled twists" and "wellspring of authentically lurid detail" (Los Angeles magazine) that have made him one of the fastest-selling novelists at work today, Michael Connelly has written a riveting, hard-edged, and unforgettable thriller, proof that he is among "the most talented of crime writers" (The New Yorker).
Chapter 1
The old lady had changed her mind about dying but by then it was too late. She had dug her fingers into the paint and plaster of the nearby wall until most of her fingernails had broken off. Then she had gone for the neck, scrabbling to push the bloodied fingertips up and under the cord. She broke four toes kicking at the walls. She had tried so hard, shown such a desperate will to live, that it made Harry Bosch wonder what had happened before. Where was that determination and will and why had it deserted her until after she had put the extension cord noose around her neck and kicked over the chair? Why had it hidden from her?
These were not official questions that would be raised in his death report. But they were the things Bosch couldn't avoid thinking about as he sat in his car outside the Splendid Age Retirement Home on Sunset Boulevard east of the Hollywood Freeway. It was 4:20 p.m. on the first day of the year. Bosch had drawn holiday call-out duty.
The ...
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