Since his first appearance in 1992's Edgar-winning The Black Echo, Detective Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch has joined Dennis Lehane's Patrick and Angie, George Pelecanos's Derek Strange, and Greg Rucka's Atticus Kodiak in the pantheon of new-school hard-boiled detectives. Rather than giving Bosch a clever gimmick (like Jeffery Deaver's Lincoln Rhyme, who is a quadriplegic), Michael Connelly embraces the noir archetype: Bosch, an L.A. homicide detective, is a chain-smoking loner who refuses to play by his superiors' rules. Although he has quit smoking, Harry's still the same tightlipped outsider, taking each crime as a personal affront as he tries to cleanse his beloved city of the darkness he sees engulfing it.

In City of Bones, Connelly's eighth Bosch title, Bosch and his well-dressed partner, Jerry Edgar, are working to identify a child's skeleton, buried for 20 years in the forest off Hollywood's Wonderland Drive, and to bring the killer to belated justice. For Bosch this is more than just another homicide, as the mystery child, beaten and abandoned, comes to represent much of what he sees as evil in his city. Add in a tragic love affair with a fellow cop, complications from overzealous media, and the growing feeling that he's fighting a losing battle about which no one cares, and the usually stoic Bosch is pushed to his limits. This isn't the strongest plot Connelly has concocted for Bosch, but it leads to an ending the whole series has been building toward. The conclusion may not shock longtime fans, but it will leave them wondering where the series will go from here. --Benjamin Reese


From Publishers Weekly
Harry Bosch is at the top of his form which is great news for Connelly fans who might have been wondering how much life the dour, haunted LAPD veteran had left in him. His latest adventure is as dark and angst-ridden as any of Bosch's past outings, but it also crackles with energy especially in the details of police procedure and internal politics that animate virtually every page. What other crime writer could make such dramatic use of the fact that the front door of a house trailer swings out rather than in, creating problems for a two-man team of detectives? Who else would create to such credible narrative effect an egotistic celebrity coroner who jeopardizes an investigation because she lets a TV camera crew from Court TV follow her around, or an overage female rookie cop so in love with danger that she commits an unthinkable act? When the bones of an abused 12-year-old boy who disappeared in 1980 turn up in the woods above Hollywood (near a street named Wonderland, where former governor Jerry Brown used to live), the case stirs up Bosch's memories of his own troubled childhood. Also, as his captain so aptly points out, Harry is the LAPD's prime "shit magnet," an investigator who attracts muck and trouble wherever he goes. So it's no great surprise when the investigation takes a couple of nasty turns, right up through the last chapter. Connelly is such a careful, quiet writer that he can slow down the story to sketch in some relatively minor characters a retired doctor, a couple who lived through their foster children without missing a beat. (One-day laydown Apr. 16)Forecast: Connelly doesn't need much help in hitting the charts, but Little, Brown is going all out anyway, with a massive television, radio and print ad campaign, transit ads in New York and a 10-city author tour. Expect blockbuster sales and blockbuster satisfaction. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
The trouble with Harry: wrapped up in a fresh new love affair and a case involving the scattered bones of a long-dead child, he finds that he must make a momentous decision. Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Tracking the twenty-year-old murder of a young boy, Bosch follows the faintest trail of clues. Len Cariou presents L.A. police detectives with gruff and world-weary demeanors. It's a little disconcerting when Harry Bosch takes up with a rookie cop, and she sounds like a squad room regular; but for the most part the characters have distinct vocal parts. Cariou presents the many details and frustrations of police work with understanding, holding the listener's attention through the case's unexpected twists. R.F.W. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* "Child cases haunted you. They hollowed you out and scarred you. There was no bulletproof vest thick enough to stop you from being pierced." LAPD detective Harry Bosch gets pierced in the worst way this time. After a doctor out walking his dog in Laurel Canyon finds a human bone, forensic anthropologists unearth the rest of the skeleton and piece together part of the story: a 12-year-old boy was murdered around 1980 after being viciously abused for most of his brief life. Bosch picks up the trail, identifying the boy but encountering both investigatory and bureaucratic roadblocks as he attempts to close in on a suspect. Meanwhile, Bosch strikes up a romance with a rookie cop--against department regulations--and quickly finds himself in the midst of a personal and professional crisis. It doesn't help that, as he learns more about the dead boy, he keeps hearing echoes from his own troubled past. After spinning his wheels just a bit in his last two novels, Connelly regains his stride here. Like Ian Rankin's John Rebus, Bosch never stops feeling the bruises he has acquired through multiple encounters with evil. His view of the world darkens with each case, and he feels more and more powerless: "True evil could never be taken out of the world. At best he was wading into the dark waters of the abyss with two leaking buckets in his hands." Harry wanders deeper into that abyss this time than ever before, and it drives him to a shocking decision that will leave series fans reeling. Hard-boiled cop fiction at its most gripping. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
In A Darkness More than Night, Michael Connelly's complex hero Harry Bosch shared center stage with another Connelly protagonist (Terry McCaleb of Blood Work) in a convoluted homicide case in which Bosch himself became a primary suspect. In City of Bones, Bosch takes the lead in the high-profile investigation of a murder committed more than 20 years in the past.

The investigation begins when a family pet unearths a cache of bones buried in a shallow grave in the hills above Laurel Canyon. Forensic evidence indicates that the bones are those of an adolescent boy who endured an extensive history of physical abuse. Bosch, who experienced his own share of adolescent trauma, takes the case to heart, pursuing every lead in the killing with typically obsessive zeal. Eventually, a phone call from a Los Angeles woman whose brother disappeared in 1980 sets Bosch on the proper path, and he identifies the dead boy as Arthur Delacroix. Locating Arthur's killer, however, turns out to be a difficult -- and hazardous -- business. Bosch's investigation leads to a number of dead ends and false conclusions before arriving at the sad, tawdry truth. Along the way, that same investigation claims two new victims: a solitary, rather pathetic set decorator who was once convicted of pedophilia, and an overzealous rookie policewoman with a lifelong penchant for high-risk activities. Though some of the characters are not as well developed or convincing as they are in Connelly's finest novels, such as The Black Echo and The Concrete Blonde, the central mystery in City of Bones is both compelling and affecting, and Connelly's portrayal of life in the inner circles of the LAPD is as credible as ever. Bosch himself -- that vulnerable, obsessive, sometimes self-destructive figure -- remains one of modern crime fiction's more durable creations. By the end of this particular investigation, Bosch has reached a turning point in his problematic 25-year career and faces a potentially life-altering decision. To be continued... (Bill Sheehan)

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"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.

SYNOPSIS

A dazzling new Harry Bosch thriller--about the past reaching up to grab the present--from one of crime fiction's new masters.

FROM THE CRITICS

Orlando Sentinel

...Bosch and Connelly are at their finest...a cracking pace...the investigation [is] tightly focused and credible...

Publishers Weekly

Harry Bosch is at the top of his form which is great news for Connelly fans who might have been wondering how much life the dour, haunted LAPD veteran had left in him. His latest adventure is as dark and angst-ridden as any of Bosch's past outings, but it also crackles with energy especially in the details of police procedure and internal politics that animate virtually every page. What other crime writer could make such dramatic use of the fact that the front door of a house trailer swings out rather than in, creating problems for a two-man team of detectives? Who else would create to such credible narrative effect an egotistic celebrity coroner who jeopardizes an investigation because she lets a TV camera crew from Court TV follow her around, or an overage female rookie cop so in love with danger that she commits an unthinkable act? When the bones of an abused 12-year-old boy who disappeared in 1980 turn up in the woods above Hollywood (near a street named Wonderland, where former governor Jerry Brown used to live), the case stirs up Bosch's memories of his own troubled childhood. Also, as his captain so aptly points out, Harry is the LAPD's prime "shit magnet," an investigator who attracts muck and trouble wherever he goes. So it's no great surprise when the investigation takes a couple of nasty turns, right up through the last chapter. Connelly is such a careful, quiet writer that he can slow down the story to sketch in some relatively minor characters a retired doctor, a couple who lived through their foster children without missing a beat. (One-day laydown Apr. 16) Forecast: Connelly doesn't need much help in hitting the charts, but Little, Brown is going all out anyway, with a massive television, radio and print ad campaign, transit ads in New York and a 10-city author tour. Expect blockbuster sales and blockbuster satisfaction. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Detective Harry Bosch is back on the homicide scene in Hollywood when the body of a 12-year-old boy, who was the victim of repeated physical abuse, is discovered. To make the case more difficult, the murder trail is cold, being more than 20 years old. Harry's investigations uncover secrets-some better left undisturbed: family violence, desertion, past sins, the seamy side of a seemingly normal neighborhood. Harry, unable to leave the case unsolved, worries about the problem until he identifies a suspect. When his partner "clears" the case, with fatal consequences, Harry decides to hang up his gun. Well read by Peter Jay Fernandez, Connelly's latest thriller provides plenty of red herrings, plot twists, and romantic interest that will keep listeners guessing for a long time.-Joanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

AudioFile

Tracking the twenty-year-old murder of a young boy, Bosch follows the faintest trail of clues. Len Cariou presents L.A. police detectives with gruff and world-weary demeanors. It's a little disconcerting when Harry Bosch takes up with a rookie cop, and she sounds like a squad room regular; but for the most part the characters have distinct vocal parts. Cariou presents the many details and frustrations of police work with understanding, holding the listener's attention through the case's unexpected twists. R.F.W. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews