The Closers by Michael ConnellyMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Jacket Blurb: 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...
Read as an audio book.
This has been one of the more engaging and interesting Harry Bosch books in my opinion.
Bosch is back on the police force after an almost three year "retirement". First day on the job he's already being threatened by Irving, has alienated his former partner J. Edgar, and is given an open-unsolved case that becomes anything but straight forward. Working with Kiz Rider - his other former partner - they begin to backtrack into a 20 year old case that has a missing evidence box, signs of police management interference, a mother that hasn't been able to let go and a father fallen to the streets, and has hate crime written all over it.
I like cold cases because we get to see the detectives doing detective work; I don't have these interludes where I have to "listen" to the antagonists next move, where I know what the bad guy is doing but the detective is off chasing a red herring. Not saying that red herrings don't happen in cold case mysteries, they just tend to be less obvious. Mostly.
I also liked that Bosch - again - wasn't a complete ass. He is working with his partner, not in a vacuum of ego. Both contribute to the work and thus, the story. There was a tendency for the character of Kiz to defer to Bosch, where I think by this time she should be a dominate personality on her own. Bosch is still struggling with his issues, but they didn't detract from the plot as they did in past books.
My one main complaint with this book is I pegged the killer right off the bat - as in the first several chapters. I don't know if the clues were that obvious, or I picked up something in the narration, but from there it was a matter of waiting to see if I was correct. And I was.
Recommended if you've read the first ten in the series.
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