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.
*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
Review
"...Bosch and Connelly are at their finest...a cracking pace...the investigation [is] tightly focused and credible..." -- Orlando Sentinel, 4/28/2002
About the Author
Michael Connelly is the author of the bestsellers A Darkness More Than Night, Void Moon, Angels Flight, Blood Work, and The Poet. Connelly has won every major prize for crime fiction, including an Edgar Award, a Nero Wolfe prize, a Macavity Award, and an Anthony Award. He lives in Los Angeles.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
City of Bones
By Michael ConnellyLittle, Brown
Copyright © 2002 Hieronymus, Inc.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-316-15405-9
Chapter One
The old lady had changed her mind about dying but by then it was toolate. She had dug her fingers into the paint and plaster of thenearby wall until most of her fingernails had broken off. Then shehad gone for the neck, scrabbling to push the bloodied fingertips upand under the cord. She broke four toes kicking at the walls. Shehad tried so hard, shown such a desperate will to live, that it madeHarry Bosch wonder what had happened before. Where was thatdetermination and will and why had it deserted her until after shehad put the extension cord noose around her neck and kicked over thechair? Why had it hidden from her?These were not official questions that would be raised in his deathreport. But they were the things Bosch couldn't avoid thinking aboutas he sat in his car outside the Splendid Age Retirement Home onSunset Boulevard east of the Hollywood Freeway. It was 4:20 p.m. onthe first day of the year. Bosch had drawn holiday call-out duty.
The day more than half over and that duty consisted of two suicideruns-one a gunshot, the other the hanging. Both victims were women.In both cases there was evidence of depression and desperation.Isolation. New Year's Day was always a big day for suicides. Whilemost people greeted the day with a sense of hope and renewal, therewere those who saw it as a good day to die, some-like the old lady-not realizing their mistake until it was too late.
Bosch looked up through the windshield and watched as the latestvictim's body, on a wheeled stretcher and covered in a greenblanket, was loaded into the coroner's blue van. He saw there wasone other occupied stretcher in the van and knew it was from thefirst suicide-a thirty-four-year-old actress who had shot herselfwhile parked at a Hollywood overlook on Mulholland Drive. Bosch andthe body crew had followed one case to the other.
Bosch's cell phone chirped and he welcomed the intrusion into histhoughts on small deaths. It was Mankiewicz, the watch sergeant atthe Hollywood Division of the Los Angeles Police Department.
"You finished with that yet?"
"I'm about to clear."
"Anything?"
"A changed-my-mind suicide. You got something else?"
"Yeah. And I didn't think I should go out on the radio with it. Mustbe a slow day for the media-getting more what's-happening callsfrom reporters than I am getting service calls from citizens. Theyall want to do something on the first one, the actress onMulholland. You know, a death-of-a-Hollywood-dream story. And they'dprobably jump all over this latest call, too."
"Yeah, what is it?"
"A citizen up in Laurel Canyon. On Wonderland. He just called up andsaid his dog came back from a run in the woods with a bone in itsmouth. The guy says it's human-an arm bone from a kid."
Bosch almost groaned. There were four or five call outs like this ayear. Hysteria always followed by simple explanation: animal bones.Through the windshield he saluted the two body movers from thecoroner's office as they headed to the front doors of the van.
"I know what you're thinking, Harry. Not another bone run. You'vedone it a hundred times and it's always the same thing. Coyote,deer, whatever. But listen, this guy with the dog, he's an MD. Andhe says there's no doubt. It's a humerus. That's the upper arm bone.He says it's a child, Harry. And then, get this. He said ..."
There was silence while Mankiewicz apparently looked for his notes.Bosch watched the coroner's blue van pull off into traffic. WhenMankiewicz came back he was obviously reading.
"The bone's got a fracture clearly visible just above the medialepicondyle, whatever that is."
Bosch's jaw tightened. He felt a slight tickle of electric currentgo down the back of his neck.
"That's off my notes, I don't know if I am saying it right. Thepoint is, this doctor says it was just a kid, Harry. So could youhumor us and go check out this humerus?"
Bosch didn't respond.
"Sorry, had to get that in."
"Yeah, that was funny, Mank. What's the address?"
Mankiewicz gave it to him and told him he had already dispatched apatrol team.
"You were right to keep it off the air. Let's try to keep it thatway."
Mankiewicz said he would. Bosch closed his phone and started thecar. He glanced over at the entrance to the retirement home beforepulling away from the curb. There was nothing about it that lookedsplendid to him. The woman who had hung herself in the closet of hertiny bedroom had no next of kin, according to the operators of thehome. In death, she would be treated the way she had been in life,left alone and forgotten.
Bosch pulled away from the curb and headed toward Laurel Canyon.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from City of Bonesby Michael Connelly Copyright © 2002 by Hieronymus, Inc.. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Ultimately, he knew, people chose their own path. They can be pointed and pushed, but they always get the final choice. Everybody’s got a cage that keeps out the sharks. Those who open the door and venture out do so at their own risk.Highlighted by 444 Kindle readers
