Award-winning former crime reporter Connelly (The Black Echo; City of Bones) hits all the right notes with this latest in his Edgar-winning mystery series featuring L.A. detective Harry Bosch. Even though this marks the ninth outing for Harry, the principled, incorruptible investigator shows little sign of slowing in his unrelenting pursuit of justice for all. Disillusioned by his constant battle with police hypocrisy and bureaucracy, Harry quits the department after 28 years on the job. Like so many ex-cops before him, he finds retirement boring: "I was staying up late, staring at the walls and drinking too much red wine." He decides to take advantage of his newly minted private-eye license and get back to work. The case he chooses-one that he had been briefly involved in four years before-is the puzzling unsolved murder of 24-year-old Angella Benton. Angella's death is linked to the theft of $2 million from a film company foolishly employing real cash as a prop on an action-movie set. Harry patiently follows the bloody trail from Angella's violated body through the Hollywood heist to the disappearance of an FBI computer expert and the shooting of two LAPD cops. His investigation eventually leads him to the elite terrorist hunters of the new Department of Homeland Security. Few will follow every twist and turn of the labyrinthine plot, but no matter. The fun comes in watching Harry slowly and brilliantly separate the seemingly impossibly knotted strands and then knit them back into whole cloth. This exciting procedural is as good as any in the series, and Connelly's concluding coda has a kicker about Harry's private life that will draw gasps of astonishment from longtime readers.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Lost Light (2003)

By: Michael Connelly

The ninth book in the Harry Bosch series

There is no end of things in the heart.

Somebody once told me that. She said it came from a poem she believed in. She understood it to mean that if you took something to heart, really brought it inside those red velvet folds, then it would always be there for you. No matter what happened, it would be there waiting. She said this could mean a person, a place, a dream. A mission. Anything sacred. She told me that it is all connected in those secret folds. Always. It is all part of the same and will always be there, carrying the same beat as your heart.

I am fifty-two years old and I believe it. At night when I try to sleep but can’t, that is when I know it. It is when all the pathways seem to connect and I see the people I have loved and hated and helped and hurt. I see the hands that reach for me. I hear the beat and see and understand what I must do. I know my mission and I know there is no turning away or turning back. And it is in those moments that I know there is no end of things in the heart.