From Publishers Weekly
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 sax-playing 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.


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-After more than 25 years with the L.A. Police Department, recently retired Harry Bosch decides to finish the murder investigation of Angella Benton, a case he had been quickly pulled off more than four years earlier. Gaining additional background information from a former colleague, now a quadriplegic as a result of having been shot during the investigation, Harry begins contacting any and all of the people who could have facts pertaining to the crime. He believes that the murder is tied to a film scene and $2 million in cash, and that the entire caper was ingeniously set up well in advance. With dogged determination, he risks his life more than once to prove his theory correct. Connelly expertly weaves the many complex story parts together, resulting in an action-packed ending. As in real life, all aspects of the case must be researched thoroughly, and the bulk of the novel involves the time-consuming, labor-intensive effort that goes into finding answers. Several subplots-including ones involving jazz, Harry's ex-wife, and another murder-help to round out characters, inject other interests, and relieve the intensity of solving the murder. Young adults who read true crime and forensics, or who are interested in police procedures, will surely pick this one up.Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VACopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Library Journal
Harry Bosch has retired, but he can't keep from taking on one last case. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
This is a police procedural, even though the protagonist, Harry Bosch, is an ex-cop. Bosch sets out to solve a four- year-old robbery and murder, and learns that an FBI agent who worked on the robbery investigation vanished in the midst of it and hasn't been seen since. Bosch gets seriously on the wrong side of the FBI, complicating an already complicated inquiry. Len Cariou keeps the listener completely involved. His nuanced, well-paced reading draws one into the action, not letting us sit back as passive listeners. And his Harry Bosch is entirely believable--tired, a bit jaded, yet fiercely on the case. R.E.K. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
*Starred Review* When we last saw Harry Bosch--City of Bones [BKL Mr 1 02]--he had resigned from the LAPD after a particularly frustrating case involving the murder of an abused child. Harry's back, but he's still not wearing a badge. This time, prompted by a former colleague, Harry is trying to resurrect a cold case, the murder of a film company employee and the subsequent robbery of $1 million being used as a prop on a film location. Working as a private investigator without a client, Harry immediately falls into harm's way: the FBI wants him off the case, claiming ties to terrorism, and is willing to get rough if he doesn't comply. But Harry plays hardball, too, and he soon has enough leverage on the feds to keep digging. In crime fiction, cold cases never fail to hide multifaceted layers of wrongdoing. This one's no different, and Harry slogs his way through every new revelation, each more shocking than the one before. What Connelly does so well in this series is to contrast Harry's desperate need to play the role of the avenger with his growing realization that what he must do to play that role has alienated him from the human intimacy he craves. It isn't an uncommon theme in hard-boiled novels, but Connelly manages to rub it raw in a way that others can't quite equal. It's never pretty watching Harry edge toward connection with those he loves and then back away, drawn by the pain of others, but it just may be the most compelling train wreck in crime fiction. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Only the money was real. Four years ago, LAPD detective Harry Bosch was on a movie set asking questions about the murder of a young production assistant when an armored car arrived with two million dollars cash for use in a heist scene. In a life-imitates-art firestorm, a gang of masked men converged on the delivery and robbed the armored car with guns blazing. Bosch got off a shot that struck one of the robbers as their van sped away, but the money was never recovered. And the young woman's murder was in the stack of unsolved-case files Bosch carried home the night he left the LAPD." Now Bosch moves full bore back into that case, determined to find justice for the young woman. Without a badge to open doors and strike fear into the guilty, he learns afresh how brutally indifferent the world can be. But something draws him on, past humiliation and harassment. It's not just that the dead woman had no discernible link to the robbery. Nor is it his sympathy for the cops who took over the case, one of them killed on duty and the other paralyzed by a bullet in the same attack. With every conversation and every thread of evidence, Bosch senses a larger presence, an organization bigger than the movie studios and more ruthless than even the LAPD. The part of Bosch that will never back down finds as fatal an opponent as he's ever encountered - and there's no guarantee that Bosch will survive the showdown ahead.

FROM THE CRITICS

USA Today

Connelly's skill as a prose craftsman remains in full force. He writes about Los Angeles and its environs as poignantly and beautifully as anyone since Nathanael West: — David Montgomery

The New York Times

Despite some shockingly sunny developments in his personal life, Bosch wears his depression like armor, making him the perfect hero for our paranoid age. — Marilyn Stasio

Booklist

What Connelly does so well in this series is to contrast Harry's desperate need to play the role of the avenger with his growing realization that what he must do to play that role has alienated him from the human intimacy he craves. It isn't an uncommon theme in hard-boiled novels, but Connelly manages to rub it raw in a way that others can't quite equal. It's never pretty watching Harry edge toward connection with those he loves and then back away, drawn by the pain of others, but it just may be the most compelling train wreck in crime fiction.

The Washington Post

As always, Connelly does many things well. He has internalized police procedure and the way cops think; he knows them as well as he knows himself. His prose is increasingly lean and muscular, although he offers an occasional homage to his first hero, Raymond Chandler, as when he writes of Hollywood: "It was a place of takers and users, of broken sidewalks and dreams. You build a city in the desert, water it with false hopes and false idols, and eventually this is what happens. The desert reclaims it, turns it arid, leaves it barren." His plot, so seemingly straightforward, builds to a series of surprises, both in the investigation and in Harry's personal life. In novel after novel, Harry has been trying to save his soul, and as this one ends he finally, unexpectedly, has salvation in his grasp. — Patrick Anderson

The Baltimore Sun