The Closers (Harry Bosch)
by Michael Connelly
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael ConnellyEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-10-02
ISBN: 0446699551
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Book Reviews of The Closers (Harry Bosch)
Book Review: The Man Is Always Worth The Reading
Summary: 5 Stars
"The Closers," (2005), is, I believe, the 12th in Michael Connelly's best-selling Harry Bosch series of mystery novels. The series, Los Angeles-set police procedurals, looks at life on the "noir" side; Connelly is a former journalist, a crime beat writer for the Los Angeles Times, who certainly earned his spurs in murder while earning his daily bread.
"The Closers" boasts a riveting, powerful, relatively fresh plot -- though it certainly has been used before - and after--by others. But never mind, it's also got his usual excellent narrative and descriptive writing, and snappy dialogue, and is informed by Connelly's deep, accurate knowledge of police work, after several years' experience as a reporter on the cop shop beat. It too is written with great knowledge of, and love for, Los Angeles, the author's adopted home town. You could pretty much use his works instead of a road map. And they clearly follow in the footsteps of earlier outstanding hardboiled Los Angeles authors Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald, but add the further ingredients of a police procedural. Finally, Connelly explicates his love of jazz as he goes.
The book at hand opens with Detective Bosch, who had previously resigned from the Los Angeles police force, being restored to service by the force's new chief, whom, I imagine, readers are supposed to take for William Bratton, previously of the Boston police, who was the new LA chief at the time. The Chief also assigns him to the Open-Unsolved Unit, what most people call the cold case unit, but the LA police informally call the closers. Here, the first case Bosch catches is the 1988 murder of a beautiful bi-racial teenage high school girl Rebecca Verloren. The case had been unsolved for seventeen years: it had destroyed the lives of the girl's parents. Forensics has now found a cold hit: blood on the murder weapon, a gun, that gave them DNA, has been matched to a racist criminal, with a long rap sheet, in the database. It is Connelly's/Bosch's thesis that in 1988, the city was already engulfed in the racial turmoil that would explode with the Rodney King case, which Connelly/Bosch mentions, that would come up in a couple of years. The King case, he theorizes, did not provide the gasoline for the explosive black riots that followed upon it, but merely struck the match. So Bosch initially investigates the case as race-related.
In the book, we again meet one of Bosch's enemies on the force, Irvin Irving, whom we will surely meet again. We might also notice that Connelly is sneaking a couple of his favorite ploys into the book: as he used to do in his earlier books, he mentions one of his works, Blue Neon Night - Michael Connelly's Los Angeles, a DVD of his that shows us Bosch's LA, that was given out on a complimentary basis to those who stood in line, as I did, to get his autograph on The Narrows (Harry Bosch). He also gives us the phrase, "the wire in the blood," simply in passing: in the early Blood Work, he mentioned that he was to collaborate on a book with Val McDermid, the Scottish tartan noir author, on a book by that name, The Wire in the Blood (St. Martin's Minotaur Mysteries.). Omnivorous mystery readers will know that McDermid did indeed write quite a book by that title, but without Connelly's participation. I did find one thing unusual for Connelly; he gives us a clue, early on, that would be a significant help in solving the mystery. In my memory, he doesn't generally do that.
Connelly is a wonderful writer, my favorite among American mystery authors, and I've read all his books save The Scarecrow, and his most recent, The Reversal. (Like many other readers, I imagine, I prefer his series works to his standalones: like many other writers, his mysteries seem more powerful if they are filtered through the sensibilities of his detective protagonist.) However, his recent standalones, SCARECROW, The Brass Verdict: A Novel (Harry Bosch), and The Lincoln Lawyer, have all been #1 New York Times Bestsellers. Crime Beat: A Decade of Covering Cops and Killers, his collected non-fiction journalism, was also a New York Times bestseller, as most of his previous standalones have been, too. Obviously, a lot of readers go for his work in any shape or form, and the man is always worth the reading.
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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