The Black Ice

In the book, narcotics officer Calexico Moore's body is discovered Christmas night in a seedy Hollywood motel, from an apparent suicide. As the L.A. police higher-ups converge on the scene to protect the department from scandal, Harry Bosch inserts himself into the investigation. The trail he follows leads to Mexican drug gangs operating across the border.

The Concrete Blonde

Detective Harry Bosch is pursuing "The Dollmaker", a serial killer who uses makeup to paint his victims. He gets a tip from a prostitute that a recent customer of hers, Norman Church, had a large amount of women's makeup in his bathroom.

Bosch goes to Church's garage, identifies himself as police, breaks in the door. Church is naked and shaved. Bosch tells him to not move, but Church starts to pull something from under his pillow, and Bosch shoots him. Church had been reaching not for a gun, but his toupee. Bosch is investigated by internal affairs and cleared in the shooting; but, since he did not follow police procedure, he is transferred from the elite Robbery-Homicide Division (RHD) back to the Hollywood table. The makeup is found to match those of nine of the Dollmaker's victims.

Four years later, Bosch is sued by Church's widow. Her attorney portrays Bosch as a cowboy and a vigilante, seeking revenge for the unsolved murder of his mother when he was a child.

During the trial, the police receive a note, purportedly from the Dollmaker, which leads to the discovery of a new victim with the same modus operandi. This victim was encased in concrete, unlike the original eleven victims, but all other aspects of the killing are the same, including the signature cross painted on a toenail. The concrete blonde victim, along with two other of the original victims, fit a different pattern: large-breasted blondes in the local adult entertainment industry who also advertise as high-class prostitutes in the local sex rags. Bosch and his task force suspect that "the Follower" is Detective Mora from Ad-Vice. Mora has ties to the adult video industry, had insider knowledge of the Dollmaker case, and was not at work during the killings not attributed to Norman Church. The task force put Mora under surveillance and Bosch breaks into Mora's house looking for evidence that he is the Follower. Instead he finds that Mora has been making pornographic movies with underage children. Mora returns to his house, finds Bosch and threatens to kill him. The rest of the task force arrive; they search Mora's house and determine that he is not the Follower. Mora does have information on who he believes is the Follower, and makes a deal: he provides the name of Professor Locke, agrees to quit the police force, and all of his crimes will be ignored. Mora got information that Locke had been seen on the set of adult movies where the slain women were cast members.

When Bosch returns to his office he finds another note from the Follower, saying that he will be taking 'his blonde'. Bosch assumes that he means his girlfriend Sylvia; when she does not answer her phone, he sends the police to her house. He arrives to an empty house, when a real estate agent shows up to show the house. Bosch finds Sylvia at his house and takes her to a hotel to protect her. Sylvia tells Bosch that they must have some time apart for her to decide if she can live with him and his dangerous job.

The next day Bosch returns to court as the jury is to restart their deliberations. Honey Chandler, the widow's attorney, does not appear. Bosch sends the police to her house as she is also a blonde. The jury reaches a verdict for the plaintiff and awards compensatory damages of one dollar and punitive damages of one dollar to Church's widow. When Bosch finally arrives at Chandler's house she has been dead 48 hours, killed in the same manner as the other Dollmaker killings, except that she also has burn and bite marks all over her body. Locke, who had been missing for several days, shows up at the crime scene. Bosch and Edgar interrogate him but discover that he has a solid alibi and dismiss him as a suspect. Bosch follows Bremmer from the crime scene to his house. He asks Bremmer if he can come in for a drink to discuss his court case. When Bremmer returns with two beers Bosch confronts him as being the Follower. Bremmer fights Bosch and gets control of his gun. Bosch, playing on Bremmer's pride, gets him to confess. Bosch had found a note that the Follower had mailed to Chandler, which mentioned an article in the Los Angeles Times. Bosch had noticed that it had been mailed before that article was published, which led him to suspect Bremmer. Bremmer had tortured Chandler to find out where she had hidden the note and envelope. Bremmer attempts to shoot Bosch but the gun is empty; Bosch grabs the magazine he had hidden in his sock, hits Bremmer with it and arrests him. Bosch had hidden a recording device in the room while Bremmer was getting the beer.

The next day Bosch forces the district attorney's office to charge Bremmer with first degree murder, as the filing attorney is not satisfied with the amount of evidence. The police then obtain a warrant to obtain blood, hair and teeth molds of Bremmer; and they match his bite marks on the body of Chandler, as well as his pubic hair to those found on two of the original Dollmaker victims. A woman who owns a storage locker company recognizes Bremmer as having rented a locker under a false name and the police find video tapes of Bremmer's killings. Bremmer makes a deal for life without parole in exchange for leading police to the bodies of his other victims. Harry takes two weeks off work to make some home improvements. Eventually Sylvia returns and they re-unite and head off for a weekend together.

The Last Coyote

Bosch is involved in an incident at work and has been put on involuntary stress leave. He must go through therapy sessions to be able to return to work. This involves talking about the incident and himself with Carmen Hinojos, a police psychologist. Three months ago, Bosch broke up with his girlfriend, Sylvia Moore. Carmen asks Harry to verbalize his mission in life. Harry decides that his mission is to investigate his mother's murder. She had been a prostitute and was strangled when Harry was twelve. He gets the murder book from the police archives and reviews the case. He first goes to visit Meredith Roman, another prostitute who was his mother's best friend at the time. The one real piece of information that Bosch gets from her is something that she did not tell the police: his mother was going to meet Arno Conklin at Hancock Park on the night of the murder. Bosch, with the help of the new cop beat/LA Times reporter, investigates Fox, Conklin, and Conklin's close associate Mittel. He discovers that Fox was killed in a hit and run while distributing campaign literature for Conklin. Conklin had been running for District Attorney. He also learns from an old cop friend that Mittel is now a very successful lawyer and campaign fund raiser. He is currently helping Robert Shepard, a computer tycoon, run for the Senate. On a whim, Harry drives to Mittel's house and ends up attending a fund-raising party. He meets Mittel and, using the name of his boss Pounds, asks a waitress at the party to deliver an envelope to Mittel. In the envelope, Harry puts a copy of a newspaper article about Fox's death and circles the names Conklin, Mittel, and Fox. He writes under the article, "What prior work experience got Johnny his job?" Harry checks with the city offices and finds out that only one of the original investigating officers is still alive and that his retirement checks are mailed to a post office box in Florida. So he takes a plane to Florida to speak with the retired detective, Jake McKittrick. He learns from him that at the beginning of the investigation, his senior partner, Eno, was called into the Assistant DA's office and told that Fox was not involved with the murder and he should not be investigated by the department. The only way they could interview him was in Conklin's office. After that interview, the investigation went nowhere and was left as an unsolved case.

In order to gain entrance to the gated community where McKittrick lives, Bosch pretends he is interested in a house for sale in the community and tours the house briefly. He goes back to the house after leaving McKittrick and eventually has a romantic encounter with the woman who owns the house, Jasmine Corian. He spends an extra day in Florida with Jasmine, and they reveal many personal secrets to each other in bed. On his way back to Los Angeles, he stops in Las Vegas to visit the widow of the other detective, Eno. He intimidates the widow's sister, who is taking care of the ninety-year-old invalid, into letting him take some of Eno's old files. From the files, he discovers that Eno had been receiving $1000 a week through a dummy corporation since one year after his mother's murder. He learns that this corporation's officers were Eno, Gordon Mittel, and Arno Conklin. When he returns to Los Angeles, there are four Los Angeles Police Department cops waiting for him inside his home. While he was in Florida, his boss, Harvey Pounds was found dead in the trunk of his car, tortured. Bosch is brought to the Parker Center for questioning. Harry realizes that when he used Pounds' name when trying to scare Mittel at the Shepard fund-raiser, it led to his death. Harry learns from LA Times reporter Keisha Russell that the writer of the article on Fox was Monte Kim. Russell gives Bosch his address obtained from the phone book. Bosch visits Kim and learns that he wrote the article on Fox's death, ignoring the illegal activities in his past in order to obtain a job with Conklin. Kim had photos of Conklin and Fox with two women (Meredith Roman and Bosch's mother) and used them to blackmail Conklin to obtain the job.

Bosch, believing that he finally has enough information to confront Conklin, visits him in his nursing home and discovers that Conklin was actually in love with Bosch's mother. On the day that she was murdered, they decided to go to Las Vegas and get married. Conklin had called Mittel to ask him to go with them to be his best man. Mittel declined and told him that marrying her would ruin his career. Conklin believes that Mittel murdered Bosch's mother. After leaving Conklin, Bosch is hit with a tire iron when trying to get in his car and awakes at Mittel's house with his head bleeding, locked in a game room. Before Mittel's enforcer can arrive, Bosch pockets a billiard ball that he hopes to use as a weapon. Mittel tells Bosch that Conklin has conveniently jumped out of the window of his room right after Bosch left. So the last loose end for him to clean up is Bosch. After Bosch tells him that he left his briefcase with his evidence in Conklin's room, Mittel nods to Jonathan to finish off Bosch. But Bosch makes Jonathan miss, hits him with the billiard ball, and eventually knocks him out. Mittel runs off, and Bosch follows. Mittel attempts to ambush Bosch and in the struggle, Mittel falls off a cliff and dies. Bosch returns to the house but cannot locate Jonathan. The police arrive, and Bosch next wakes up in the emergency room. Bosch realizes that he can prove that Mittel killed his mother by checking his fingerprints against the print found on the belt that killed his mother. He obtains the prints from the medical examiner's office but they do not match. Bosch has gone through all of this and still has not found his mother's killer.

He returns to talk to Hinojos. During this meeting, she gives Bosch her opinion on the photos from his mother's crime scene. She noticed that his mother was wearing all gold jewelry and the belt that was used to kill her was silver, which is a combination which a woman would not normally wear. Bosch's mother might not have been wearing the belt. The killer may have been wearing the belt and used it to kill his mother. Bosch believes he finally knows who killed his mother and returns to Meredith Roman's house, only to find that several days before she committed suicide. She left Bosch a note trying to explain her actions. He calls 911 and is about to leave when Jonathan confronts him with a gun. He had been waiting for him, letting him find Meredith and the letter. Since Jonathan believes he is going to kill Bosch and escape, he tells him the truth: that in actuality, he is Johnny Fox. His death was faked, and he remained with Mittel as his bodyguard. It was Fox who had killed Pounds and Conklin. The police finally arrive, and Fox is shot while trying to escape.

The Poet

The book starts with Jack McEvoy, a crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News ("Death is my beat"), relating how the news of his identical twin brother Sean's suicide was broken to him. Sean was a homicide detective with the Denver Police, who was found dead in his car in a remote parking lot. A one-sentence suicide note was found in the car with him, and it seemed impossible that someone else could have killed him. McEvoy, though, is reluctant to accept that his brother had succumbed to depression resulting from his investigations, even though the last one was particularly brutal: Theresa Lofton, a young college student, who was found in a park in two pieces.

After much investigation on his own, including retracing his brother's investigation into the Lofton case, Jack concludes that his brother's death was simply made to look like a suicide by a serial killer. By focusing on homicide detectives who committed suicide in a similar fashion and left a one-sentence suicide note quoting the works of Edgar Allan Poe (as Sean's did), Jack finds three clear matches to his brother's death. When the FBI finally realizes that he is on to something and attempts to block him from further access, he is able to trade his knowledge of the other deaths (one of which the FBI had not uncovered) for a role with the FBI investigative team headed by Robert Backus, the son of a famous agent within the bureau who has been overshadowed by his father's legend. Assigned the duty of handling him is agent Rachel Walling, one of Backus' main proteges, and the two of them become personally involved. The FBI nicknames the serial killer "The Poet" due to his use of Poe's lines with the victims.

As the case focuses on an Internet network of pedophiles and one in particular (William Gladden), McEvoy is taken along on the operation to arrest Gladden, who is suspicious of the set-up and kills the FBI agent trying to arrest him, Gordon Thorson (Walling's ex-husband). McEvoy ends up killing Gladden himself while being held hostage. However, Gladden's comments about his brother's death lead McEvoy to believe that Gladden was not the killer, even though the case has been officially closed. He then finds evidence that the killings had a connection to the FBI and identifies a phone call to the FBI from Thorson's room that he links to a "boasting" fax sent to the bureau by The Poet. Since McEvoy knew that Walling had sent Thorson on a fake errand to buy condoms during the time the fax was sent, he suspects Walling of being The Poet and of posting to the pedophile network under the name "Eidolon", another Poe reference. He then learns that Walling's father, a cop, had committed suicide when she was a teenager ... and had been suspected by the investigating officers of molesting Rachel over a period of time. Since pedophiles tend to have been abused as children, McEvoy becomes worried enough to tell Backus of his suspicions. Backus tells McEvoy that they'll set a trap for Walling and then takes him to a remote location—where Backus drugs McEvoy into nonresistance. Backus admits that he himself is both Eidolon and The Poet, because the room mistakenly billed to Thorson was actually the one in which he stayed. He admits to all of the deaths and to his setup of Gladden as the "fall guy" for the murders.

As Backus prepares to sodomize and then kill McEvoy, Walling (who was suspicious because of messages that she had received from both men) shows up and eventually saves McEvoy's life by knocking Backus out the window and down a long hill. Later the police find a body; however, it is left open if this is Backus. Meanwhile, as the facts of the case become known, Walling's judgment is called into question due to her personal relationship with McEvoy and her professional relationship with Backus. A tabloid publishes a photo of McEvoy and Walling together. However, because McEvoy suspected her, Walling ends their relationship and takes a leave to Italy. McEvoy then takes a leave from his paper to write a book about the events, although Walling explains to him that the book will forever taint the FBI because of Backus.

Trunk Music

A body found in the trunk of a Rolls Royce seems to have connections with the mob and leads Bosch and his investigation to Las Vegas. It's Harry Bosch's first case after being transferred to the Homicide table. The car was found by a beat cop near the Hollywood Bowl. Harry arrives during a concert. Fireworks are scheduled after the concert. At the encouragement of Fire Chief, and the approval of the Medical Examiner, Bosch arranges for the car to be towed away on a flatbed tow truck. The examination of the car and body are completed in an LAPD building. After the name and address of the victim is discovered, Harry and one of his team goes to interview the wife. He then goes to search a small office the victim maintains at a small studio facility. He gains access to surveillance video of the entrance to the office. The video shows that the office had been broken into and phone bugs were taken out. The team later finds out that a branch of LAPD had placed bugs on the victim's phone without authorization. Bosch is sent to Las Vegas to track down what the victim was doing there and who had contact with him when he was there. Bosch sees video of the poker game the victim was in, and he recognizes one of the other players as form FBI agent Eleanor Wish. He tracks her down through the Las Vegas police chief. Bosch spends the night with her. Later, she is pulled into police HQ where Bosch clears her. But she is kidnapped by the local syndicate. Bosch finds out where she is being held and frees her. The story continues from there.

Blood Work

After receiving a heart transplant, retired FBI criminal profiler Terrell "Terry" McCaleb is contacted by Graciela Rivers, the sister of his donor Gloria, and asked to investigate her death, which occurred during an unsolved convenience store robbery. McCaleb had become a minor celebrity as the head of the FBI task force on the "Code Killer", an L.A.-based serial killer (similar to the Zodiac Killer) who always signed his notes with the code "903 472 568", but he is now living on his fishing boat and has been inactive to prevent rejection of his new heart (to the extent that he cannot even drive). He reluctantly agrees to help Graciela but finds the police handling the case to be extremely hostile. However, he is able to match the style of another killing to Gloria's and gets a copy of the files for both cases from Jaye Winston, the sheriff's deputy on that case. He surprisingly discovers that the call reporting Gloria's shooting was placed slightly prior to the actual shooting, leading him to suspect that Gloria was targeted for murder. He interviews the only witness to the second crime, a man called James Noone, but fails to learn much.

As he continues to investigate, with Winston's support but against the wishes of his doctor, he finds that the two cases plus a third case are linked through the use of a common gun and a common line said by the killer after the shooting, "Don't forget the cannoli" from The Godfather. He then learns that the first two victims had McCaleb's blood types and were on a list of people who had previously donated blood. If the victims died, McCaleb would benefit from their death as a potential organ recipient. Because of this, the police on Gloria's case focus on him as the possible killer and get a search warrant for his boat. Then, the real killer begins to plant evidence implicating McCaleb on his boat, expecting the police to find it, but McCaleb finds and then conceals the most incriminating evidence. Examining the facts again, McCaleb realizes that the distinctive attribute of the "Code Killer" was that the nine-digit identifying code did not include a one, and that "Noone" ("no one") is actually the Code Killer. By following the contact information on Noone, McCaleb and Jaye Winston find the Code Killer's files, which prove that he had deliberately killed three people to get McCaleb a new heart. Although McCaleb is thus cleared, the fact that Gloria's death was directly due to his illness creates a rift in his increasingly personal relationship with Graciela and her nephew Raymond, Gloria's son.

McCaleb, who is still supposed to be inactive, secretly continues to trace the Code Killer from information that he learned during his interview with "Noone" and drives to a location in Baja California that matches one Noone described. He then finds and is overpowered by the Code Killer, who tells him that he has kidnapped Graciela and Raymond and buried them alive. Despite serious medical problems from so much activity, McCaleb is able to kill him and then uses the little information he has to locate and rescue Graciela and Raymond. Upon his return, he apologizes to his doctor and says that he went to Mexico because he needed a vacation. Only Jaye Winston among the law enforcement officials figures out what really happened.

Angels Flight

When the body of high-profile black lawyer Howard Elias is found inside one of the cars on Angels Flight, a cable railway in downtown Los Angeles, there’s not a detective in the city who wants to touch the case. For Elias specialized in lawsuits alleging police brutality, racism, and corruption, and every LAPD cop is a possible suspect in his killing.

Detective Harry Bosch is put in charge. Elias’s murder occurred on the eve of a major trial: on behalf of black client, Michael Harris, Elias was to bring a civil case against the LAPD for violent interrogation tactics that had caused his client the partial loss of his hearing. Harris had been acquitted of the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl, but many, including Bosch, believe him guilty. Elias had let it be known that the trial would serve a dual purpose — to target and bring down the guilty cops and to expose the real murderer of the little girl. Post Rodney King, the 1992 riots, and the trial of O.J. Simpson, the City of Angels is living on its nerves. To discover the truth Harry must dig deep in his own backyard — except that it’s a minefield of suspicion and hate that could detonate in his face.

And as if he didn’t have enough on his mind, his happiness with Eleanor Wish looks to be short-lived. Five cards on the felt are pulling her back to a place where Harry cannot follow, back to herself.

Void Moon

Cassie Black is an ex-convict who works at a Porsche dealership. She had served five years in prison for conspiring with her previous partner-in-crime, Max Freeling, to steal the winnings of casino visitors while they are asleep. The last plan failed when an undercover agent (later revealed as Jack Karch) posed as the victim, forcing Max to take his own life. Unknown to all, Cassie and Max have a daughter named Jodie, who was born when Cassie served her time in prison. The daughter was put up for adoption and Cassie has been tracking her development silently.

When Cassie learns that her daughter will be moving to Paris with her adopted parents in the near future, she decides to return to the trade for the last big pay day. Once she gets hold of the money, she plans to bring Jodie away with her. She approaches Max's half brother, Leo Renfro, for a heist job. Leo assigns her to go back to the Cleopatra, or "Cleo", the casino which Max's failed attempt took place. The victim ("mark") this time is apparently a high roller and a $500,000 reward awaits. Leo is confident of Cassie's capabilities despite her long hiatus, but warns her to avoid being in the mark's hotel room during the period of the "void moon" on the day of action. Max's death, along with other unpleasant things, have occurred during that period. Cassie successfully breaks into the hotel room of the mark in the wee hours of the morning, but is forced to remain hidden in the room during the period of the void moon due to unforeseen circumstances. Later that morning, it is revealed that the mark has been shot dead and the suitcase containing the money had been taken from the safe.

The mark was actually a courier for the Miami's Cuban 'Mafia' and he was carrying $2.5 Million in the suitcase as partial payoff for rights to buy over the Cleo. The owner of the Cleo, Vincent Grimaldi, hires private investigator Jack Karch to recover the money. Jack is briefed by Grimaldi that Leo Renfro is in cahoots with the Chicago Mafia for this crime. He successfully tracks down the supplier of Cassie's equipment for the theft and obtains Cassie's name. Meanwhile, Cassie persuades Leo to split the money and leave after learning of its origin. Leo requests two days to sort the mess out, but commits suicide when confronted by Jack about Cassie. The next day, Jack poses as a customer at the Porche showroom and Cassie takes him out for a car ride. Cassie successfully crashes the car upon learning about Jack's motive and returns to Leo's house to retrieve the money. Jack planned to ambush Cassie at her house but instead, critically wounds the parole officer once he learns of Cassie's daughter, Jodie. Jack successfully "abducts" Jodie before the police arrive and drives her to the Cleo to set up a meeting with Cassie three hours later. Unknown to Jack, Cassie arrives much earlier and devises a plan to rescue Jodie and frame Jack in the process.

Grimaldi captures Jack and reveals to him that the whole plan was a setup because the Miami gangsters would never be approved to buy the Cleo. The Chicago Mafia was never involved. His thugs killed the courier, and Miami will now search for the soon-to-be dead Karch as the thief. Using a concealed weapon, Karch surprises and kills the thugs and Grimaldi in the elevator. He returns to the room to the surprise of Cassie and Jodie, but, momentarily distracted, allows Cassie to attack him and push him out of the window to his death (the same way that Max had died, and that Karch had planned to kill her and Jodie). Cassie throws some money out of the window to cause a commotion, allowing Jodie and her to slip out unnoticed.

On the way back to L.A., Cassie realizes she will be unable to provide an enjoyable life for Jodie if the police suspects her (Cassie) of all the crimes that Karch has committed. Instead, Cassie returns Jodie home to her adoptive parents and drives off with the remainder of the money.

A Darkness More Than Night
 

Terry McCaleb and Graciela Rivers have married and have an infant daughter named Cielo, and McCaleb's fishing charter business is running full-time on Catalina Island. Nevertheless, sheriff's deputy Jaye Winston brings McCaleb a file involving a murder scene filled with exotic elements and asks McCaleb to take a look at it, as the police have gotten nowhere. As McCaleb analyzes the clues, they seem to point straight toward Harry Bosch, whom McCaleb knows from a previous investigation before his retirement. Bosch is currently a key witness in a separate high-profile murder case involving a movie director, and author/reporter Jack McEvoy, who wrote The Poet, is covering the case.

After McCaleb alerts the police to Bosch's probable involvement in the murder, Bosch goes to Catalina himself to challenge McCaleb's work and to ask him to re-examine the evidence. Based on a parking ticket that McCaleb finds, he concludes that Bosch may have been set up by the director in order to discredit his evidence in the court case, but the key evidence in proving that is a post office surveillance tape that was in the process of being erased, and from which nothing usable can be recovered.

Nevertheless, Bosch and McCaleb pretend that they have recovered something from the tape, and the real killer in the second case (an ex-cop that handled security for the director) then targets and almost kills McCaleb. Bosch saves McCaleb and captures the ex-cop, while killing his younger brother. In return for not being charged with felony-murder in his brother's death, the ex-cop turns over evidence implicating the director in the frame of Bosch, and the director agrees to plead guilty to murder in a plea bargain seen by only McEvoy (who got a tip from Bosch) among the reporters. However, McCaleb realizes that Bosch was around to save him only because Bosch knew all the details of the potential frame, which Bosch had lied about to McCaleb, and McCaleb breaks off any renewed relationship with Bosch as a result. Bosch then "baptizes" himself in a plan for a fresh start.

City of Bones

On New Year’s Day, a dog digs up a bone in Laurel Canyon outside of Los Angeles. The dog’s owner, a doctor, recognizes the bone as human and calls it in to the police. Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch takes on the case together with his colleague Jerry Edgar and after investigating the matter further, a shallow grave containing the bones of a child, is discovered. Bosch can’t let go of the case, a case that brings back memories from his own childhood, and starts an investigation. The only clue that he has to go on is the skateboard found during a search at a suspect's house. The body turns out to have been a 12-year-old boy that has been buried 20 years earlier. To solve the murder, Bosch has to dig through records of cases involving disappearances and runaways dating far back in time. In order to try to solve the crime, Bosch has to chase down possible witnesses and suspects from near and far. After 20 years time, a lot of the details once remembered about the disappearance of the boy are blurred and leads Bosch fumbling in the dark. At the same time, a female rookie named Julia Brasher joins the department. Even though Bosch has been warned not to fall for a rookie, he does and this leads to further complications, both inside and outside of the investigation.

Chasing the Dime

A hot-shot entrepreneur is on the verge of announcing a historic (and potentially very lucrative) breakthrough in nanotechnology. In an attempt to escape the pressure of his work, he becomes fascinated with a peculiar puzzle: what happened to the woman who had his telephone number before him, and why are so many lonely men calling her. The trail leads him into an entangling jungle of murder and betrayal.

Lost Light

Lost Light is the first novel set after Bosch retires from the LAPD at the end of the prior story. Having received his private investigator's license, Bosch investigates an old case concerning the murder of a production assistant on the set of a film. The case leads him back into contact with his ex-wife Eleanor Wish, who is now a professional poker player in Las Vegas, and Bosch learns at the end that he and Eleanor have a young daughter.

The Narrows

While investigating the death of ex-FBI profiler Terry McCaleb at his wife's request, Bosch begins to suspect that notorious serial killer and ex-FBI supervisor Robert Backus, aka The Poet, presumed dead, may have murdered McCaleb. Digging deeper, Bosch follows a lead to Las Vegas that brings him into contact with the FBI. Meanwhile, FBI agent Rachel Walling, who was at one time Backus's protégé in the FBI (as McCaleb had also been) and who has been exiled by the FBI to South Dakota for four years for her role in The Poet investigation, is the subject of messages sent by Backus to the FBI. As Bosch and Walling are both outsiders to the main FBI investigation, they eventually join forces. The novel shifts points of view, cutting from Bosch's first-person commentary to the third-person perspectives of Walling and Backus. Bosch meets a neighbor whom he later discovers (in the book The Closers) to be Cassie Black, the main character of Void Moon, and he begins a relationship with Walling. He also accepts an offer from his old partner Kiz Rider to rejoin the LAPD under a new chief of police, as a homicide detective in the Open-Unsolved Unit within the department's Robbery-Homicide Division.

In the end, Bosch and Walling bring The Poet to justice by chasing him into the concrete channels of the swollen Los Angeles River in L.A., where he drowns while Bosch barely survives. His death is confirmed this time, as opposed to The Poet where he was merely presumed dead. However, the relationship between Bosch and Walling falls apart in the end when Bosch learns that the FBI had discovered that Backus had nothing to do with McCaleb's death but had withheld the information from him. In fact, McCaleb had killed himself in a manner to make his death look accidental, as his heart transplant was failing, and he did not want to burden his wife and children with the crippling expense of additional medical procedures.

The Closers

LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) detective Harry Bosch is back on the force after a three-year retirement. Assigned to the Open-Unsolved Unit (cold case squad) and teamed with former partner Kizmin "Kiz" Rider, Harry's first case back involves the murder of 16-year-old high school girl Rebecca Verloren in 1988, reopened because of a DNA match to blood found on the murder weapon. The blood on the gun belongs to a local low-life white supremacist, Roland Mackey, a fact that links him to the crime via the victim's biracial family. But the blood indicates only that Mackey had possession of the gun, so how to pin him to the crime? Connelly meticulously leads the reader along with Bosch and Rider as they explore the links to Mackey and along the way connect the initial investigation of the crime to a police conspiracy orchestrated by Bosch's nemesis Irvin Irving to cover up the ties of a ranking officer's son with a neo-Nazi group. Most striking of all, in developments that give this novel astonishing moral force,^{[according to whom?]} the pair explore the "ripples" of the long-ago crime, how it has destroyed the young girl's family—leaving the mother trapped in the past and plunging the father into a nightmare of homelessness and alcoholism—and how it drives Rider, and especially Bosch, into a deeper understanding of their own purposes in life.

The Lincoln Lawyer

Moderately successful criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller operates around Los Angeles County out of a Lincoln Town Car (hence the title) driven by a former client working off his legal fees. While most clients are drug dealers and gangsters, the story focuses on an unusually important case of wealthy Los Angeles realtor Louis Roulet accused of assault and attempted murder. At first, he appears to be innocent and set up by the female "victim."

Roulet's lies and many surprising revelations change Mickey's original case theory, making him reconsider the situation of Jesus Menendez, a former client serving time in San Quentin State Prison after pleading guilty to a similar and mysteriously related crime.

Haller outmaneuvers Roulet (revealed to be a rapist and murderer) without violating ethical obligations, frees the innocent Menendez, and continues in legal practice, though not without much self-examination and emotional baggage.

Echo Park

In 1993, Harry Bosch and his partner Jerry Edgar caught the Marie Gesto case. Marie was a young equestrian who went missing. Her car and clothing turned up in a garage but her body was never found. Bosch and Edgar had pegged a likely culprit – the son of a wealthy and powerful industrialist, but the detectives never found enough evidence to charge the suspect and the case went cold. Between then and the start of this novel, Bosch had retired from the LAPD and worked as a private investigator for three years but returned to the force because things didn't work out the way he thought they would in retirement. Now, nearing 60, Bosch is working in the prestigious Open-Unsolved Unit at Parker Center, going over cold cases with his most recent partner, Kizmin "Kiz" Rider. A serendipitous traffic stop in L.A.'s Echo Park neighborhood nabs Reynard Waits, a man with body parts in his van on the floorboard in front of the front seat. Detective Freddy Olivas is working the case and Richard O'Shea is the prosecutor assigned. Soon Waits has confessed to a string of slayings involving prostitutes and runaways, as well as to two earlier murders: one of a pawnshop owner during the 1992 riots, the other of Marie Gesto. When the Gesto case files are reexamined, it seems that Waits had called the police shortly after the murder, pretending to be a tipster, but Bosch and Edgar never followed up on the tip. Without this costly error, Waits could have been implicated within a week of Gesto's disappearance.

The Overlook

The Overlook reunites Bosch with his most recent former flame, FBI agent Rachel Walling. Bosch must break in a new and much younger partner, Ignacio "Iggy" Ferras, when they're called to take over the investigation of the execution-style murder of medical physicist Stanley Kent on a Mulholland Drive overlook. When a special FBI unit, headed by Walling, arrives and tries to usurp his case, claiming it's a matter of national security, Bosch refuses to back down. Walling's focus on the theft of radioactive cesium from a hospital where Kent assisted in cancer treatments, and her unwillingness to share information only makes Bosch more determined to solve the case.

Evidence mounts that the murder is part of a terrorist plot to build and deploy a dirty bomb, justifying the FBI's moves to push the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and Bosch to the sidelines. Refusing to be sidelined, Bosch aggressively works around the FBI in order to track down Stanley Kent's killers, much to the chagrin of his young, inexperienced partner, who sees his career at the LAPD jeopardized by Bosch's actions. The FBI agents, including Rachel Walling, view Bosch as endangering their attempts to retrieve the missing cesium and to track down known terrorists. Relying on instinct and experience, Bosch pursues his line of inquiry, ultimately succeeding in solving the murder and recovering the cesium.

The principal players in the story are:

Harry Bosch, the lead detective on the case, who is the principal protagonist of this and twelve previous Harry Bosch novels.

Rachel Walling, who was romantically involved with Harry in a number of previous Harry Bosch novels. In this story, while Harry has hopes of re-connecting with Rachel, their relationship is strained, owing to conflicting views on how the investigation should be carried out.

Ignacio "Iggy" Ferras, Bosch's young partner. Iggy wants to play by the book and is seriously disturbed by Bosch's let's-break-the-rules attitude. At one point, he tells Bosch that he can't work with him and will be requesting a new partner.

Stanley Kent, the murder victim who has stolen 32 sources of cesium from a Los Angeles hospital in response to demands from unknown parties who have taken his wife hostage. If used in a dirty bomb, tens of thousands of people could die from radiation exposure.

Alicia Kent, the beautiful wife of the murder victim, who was taken hostage in her home by two intruders. She was used by the intruders to pressure Stanley Kent to steal the cesium from the hospital.

Jack Brenner, Rachel Walling's FBI partner and superior and the lead FBI agent on the case. His primary concern is dealing with the terror threat associated with the stolen cesium. To him, Bosch's homicide investigation is a secondary concern.

Cliff Maxwell, an FBI agent working on the case, with whom Bosch has two violent encounters.

The Brass Verdict

Since the events of the previous novel, attorney Mickey Haller has spent a year recuperating from his wounds and a subsequent addiction to painkillers. He is called back to the practice of law when an old acquaintance, defense attorney Jerry Vincent, is murdered. Haller inherits Vincent's caseload, which includes the high-profile trial of Walter Elliott, a Hollywood mogul accused of murdering his wife Mitzi and her German lover. Haller secures this "franchise" case, persuading the mogul to keep him on as counsel by promising not to seek a postponement of the trial, which is due to start in nine days.

Meanwhile, maverick LAPD detective Harry Bosch, the main character in several earlier novels written by Connelly, is investigating Vincent's murder. Bosch, warning that Vincent's killer may come after Haller next, persuades the reluctant lawyer to cooperate in the ongoing murder investigation. Meanwhile, Haller shakes off the rust, and lingering self-doubts, as he prepares for the double-murder trial.

Among the cases Haller takes on is that of a former surfing champion, Patrick, who, while addicted to painkillers after a surfing accident, has stolen a diamond necklace while at the home of a friend. Haller feels sorry for Patrick because of his own history of addiction, and employs the young man to drive his Lincoln. He manages to get Patrick off the charges against him by playing on a hunch that the stolen diamonds were not genuine.

Assisted by his investigator, Cisco, and his office assistant, Lorna (who is one of Haller's two ex-wives), Haller works out a strategy to defend his client, based on the fact that the gunshot residue found on Elliott's hands is the result of having travelled in a police car used earlier in the day to transport another prisoner. He also throws doubt as to whether the couple's murderer was actually after Mitzi or her lover. In the meantime, Walter admits that he is involved with the Mafia and that he believes they murdered both his wife and the lawyer Jerry Vincent.

On the strength of information from Bosch, Haller becomes suspicious that Vincent has bribed someone in the legal process to plant a jury member who would help obtain an acquittal for Walter Elliott, regardless of the evidence. On investigation, he finds that one of the jurors has stolen someone else's identity, and he ensures that this information becomes known to the judge in the Elliott case, resulting in the trial being brought to a halt just as it begins to go Haller's way. Elliott, however, confesses to Haller that he actually did kill Mitzi and her lover, and Haller is left pondering on the outcome of the case. During the evening he receives a call from the police, asking him to help a former client. When he arrives on the scene, he is attacked by a man who attempts to push him over a precipice. Bosch and his team, who have been observing Haller, arrive on the scene just in time to prevent the murder, and the attacker is discovered to be the planted juryman.

Haller figures out that the person behind the corruption is in fact a senior judge, and confronts her with his evidence, leading to her arrest by the FBI. When he learns that Walter Elliott and his secretary have also been murdered, he assumes she is behind that murder, but it turns out that justice has been dispensed by Mitzi lover's family before their return to Germany.

Unknown to Haller, but revealed in previous Connelly novels, is the fact that Bosch is Haller's half-brother. Haller works out the puzzle by the end of the book, going mainly on the resemblances between Bosch and his own father (himself a lawyer) but at this point no arrangement is made for the two men to meet again.

The Scarecrow

The story begins with Jack McEvoy's termination by the Los Angeles Times due to the newspaper's financial crisis. He is given two weeks to train his replacement, Angela Cook, on the "cop beat" and decides that he wants to write one more major story before his last day. Jack focuses on the case of 16-year-old drug dealer Alonzo Winslow, who confessed that he brutally raped one of his clients, then stuffed her body in the trunk with a plastic bag over her head, tied shut with a length of rope around her neck. Angela, a beautiful and ambitious young reporter, maneuvers to get herself a part of the story. However, after Jack is given access to the defense files, he learns that Alonzo only confessed to stealing the car containing the body, not to the rape-murder. In researching trunk murders on the Internet, Angela unwittingly finds evidence of a similar crime in Las Vegas. However, Angela's research also took her to a "trap" site set up by the real murderer: Wesley Carver, an MIT graduate who is the chief security officer of a "server farm" (colocation and backup services) near Phoenix, referred to by everyone as the "scarecrow" of the farm. Carver cracks her e-mail password at the Times and learns that Jack is headed to Vegas. He promptly creates a fake data emergency so that his company will send him to L.A.

The next day, Jack finds that none of his credit cards nor his cell phone work, so he buys a throwaway phone. He shows the evidence of the identical L.A. murder to the attorney for the convicted Vegas murderer, who gives Jack a letter permitting him to meet his client, imprisoned in a remote location in Nevada. During the lengthy drive on the "loneliest road in America", Jack calls FBI agent Rachel Walling, his former girlfriend to whom he hasn't spoken in years, to report the "under the radar" serial killer and also tells her about his bad luck that day. When he arrives at the prison, he is told that he cannot see the prisoner until the next day and books a room in a local hotel. A cowboy with long sideburns plays slots next to him. When Jack heads to his room, he sees "Sideburns" coming directly toward him in the hallway as his door opens ... to find Rachel inside his room. "Sideburns" passes by. Rachel had taken a private FBI plane to the prison after she concluded that Jack's discoveries and his electronic problems were linked but that she had no way to warn him. Rachel and Jack learn that "Sideburns" was not staying at the hotel and surmise that he must be the killer. When calling the Times, Jack learns that Angela has disappeared. Rachel and Jack promptly take the FBI jet back to L.A., during which Rachel examines the evidence and notes that the murdered women were both exotic dancers with similar body types ("giraffes"), and that both were put in leg braces ("iron maidens") while being sexually abused before death, a perversion known as abasiophilia. On arrival, Rachel admits that her recent relationship with a police detective ended in part because she still had feelings for Jack, but they then find Angela's dead body under Jack's bed, killed in the same style as the other victims.

Because of Rachel's testimony, Jack is cleared of Angela's murder, and the evidence causes both Alonzo and the Vegas convict to be freed. The FBI links the trap site to Bill Denslow, a fake name used by an online client of Carver's server farm. Jack is a featured guest on CNN to discuss the case, but Rachel is summoned to a disciplinary hearing and forced to resign from the FBI under threat of a theft prosecution for "stealing" the gasoline in the FBI plane during the round trip to Nevada. Carver has his assistant, whom he gave the pseudonym "Freddie Stone", help him murder and bury the server farm's CEO and then quit. Jack deduces that the serial killer knew non-public legal information about his victims and finds that all of them were represented by law firms whose sites were handled through Carver's server farm, just like the trap site. He persuades Rachel to join him there, where they pose as potential clients and talk to Carver, who doesn't reveal that he knows their real identities. Following a trail laid by Carver, they find Stone's house, identify him as "Sideburns", and uncover evidence concerning the killings. They call in the FBI, and Rachel is able to use her role in finding the killer to regain her job. Jack agrees to return to L.A. and goes to Rachel's hotel room to say goodbye—but finds that she has just been kidnapped by Stone. He intercepts Stone, rescues an unconscious Rachel from a laundry bin, and then chases and kills Stone in a battle on the top floor. Rachel tells Jack that the FBI believes there were two killers: Stone and Angela's murderer. With Carver's help, Rachel and the FBI team find evidence that Stone and the missing CEO committed all of the murders.

Jack's high profile causes the Times to rescind his termination, even though Jack's role as a participant means that he cannot write the story of the Arizona events. Jack turns it down and accepts a two-book deal to write about this case. However, Jack then sees a picture from The Wizard of Oz in his editor's office and realizes that the method used to suffocate the victims looks like the classic head of a scarecrow, except using a plastic bag instead of a burlap sack. He immediately heads to Arizona to warn a disbelieving Rachel, including the links to the real Fred Stone and Bill Denslow, but unfortunately meets her in a coffee shop near the server farm with a full-time Webcam in it. Jack deduces that they are being watched by 'The Scarecrow' over the webcam. Carver watches their discussion, then ambushes the other FBI agents. Carver's plan to kill the agents and fake his own death is foiled when Jack figures it out, and Rachel shoots Carver in the head when he tries to ambush them, leaving Carver in a seemingly permanent comatose state. In a brief epilogue, Jack's research has revealed that Carver's mother was an exotic dancer similar in appearance to the victims who needed to wear leg braces when not performing.

The story closes with Carver in medical lockdown, deep in a coma, alone with his thoughts.

Nine Dragon

Harry Bosch is still back in homicide (no closer duty for him) and during a slow night he is asked to investigate a shooting in a "rougher" section of L.A. Harry and his partner (Detective Ignacio Ferras) grudgingly take the assignment and learn that a Chinese-American convenience store owner was murdered behind his own counter. The case draws Harry's interest because he remembers the store and that the owner had been kind to him several years earlier. He assures the owner's son, Robert Li, that he will catch the culprit.

Harry starts to realize that this might not have been a routine robbery but a possible execution by a Triad hitman. With the help of Detective David Chu of the Chinese gang unit, Harry starts to zero in on a suspect and then receives a threatening call telling him to back off. Harry shrugs it off and continues but his investigation stalls when he receives a video showing his daughter (Maddie) being kidnapped in Hong Kong, which he believes to be related to the Triad and his murder investigation. He rushes off to save her, realizing that if he is not back within 48 hours, a suspect in the shooting will be set free. Because of the International Date Line and the length of the flights, Harry will have less than 24 hours in Hong Kong to find Maddie.

During a tense plane ride to Hong Kong, Harry feels powerless because there is nothing he can do in the air. When he gets to Hong Kong, he is aided by Maddie's mother, his ex-wife Eleanor Wish, and her Chinese boyfriend. Harry has limited clues but through very good forensic science, he is able to determine where to look for Maddie – however, during the search, Eleanor is killed by thieves. Despite that, Harry and her boyfriend continue to race to find Maddie because any delay could mean that she might already be dead or shipped into slavery by the Triad. Harry rescues her from the Triad in the nick of time and takes her to L.A. After his departure, the Chinese government sends officers to L.A. to extradite Harry for his violations of Chinese law in his search for Maddie, but Harry's half-brother, lawyer Mickey Haller, forces the Chinese to drop this attempt. However, Harry and Chu determine, through other forensic evidence, that there is no connection between Maddie's kidnapping and his murder investigation. Instead, the murder evidence points to Robert Li, the son of the victim, and his best friend Eugene Lam.

Bosch and Chu arrest Lam, whom they believe to be the killer, while leaving Ferras to follow Robert Li. Lam reveals that the entire murder was a plot concocted by Mia Li, the victim's daughter, to relieve her of the burden of her parents; Robert had come up with the idea of disguising it as a Triad killing. When Bosch and Chu inform Ferras, he decides to single-handedly arrest Robert Li as an act of defiance against Bosch, but he is killed by Mia during the arrest. Mia then commits suicide. After Ferras' funeral, Maddie confesses to Harry that the "kidnapping" was originally a fake that she planned with "Quick", a Chinese friend, to get her mother to agree to let her live with Harry. However, when presented with the opportunity, Quick turned it into a real kidnapping, making the deal with the Triad from which Harry saved her. Maddie blames herself for the deaths that followed. Harry consoles her, promising to show her how they can make up for their mistakes.

The Reversal

Mickey Haller, who has become increasingly frustrated in his role as a defense lawyer, agrees to undertake the prosecution role on behalf of the city of Los Angeles, in the retrial of a convicted kidnapper and killer that had been granted as a result of new DNA evidence. His one condition before accepting the task is that he is permitted to choose his own team; he chooses his ex-wife Maggie McPherson as his co-prosecutor, and his half-brother Harry Bosch as his investigator from the LAPD. The prosecution case rests largely on the testimony of Sarah Gleason, the elder sister of the victim, Melissa Landy.

The body of 12-year-old Melissa was discovered in 1986, discarded in a dumpster, only a few hours after she was reported missing. Unknown to the killer, her older sister Sarah had been hiding in the garden and had witnessed her abduction. On the day of the murder, she identified Jason Jessup, a truck driver, as the man who snatched Melissa from the garden. The evidence against Jessup also includes strands of Melissa's hair, found in the seat of his truck. Thus, her testimony is essential for establishing the quick police focus on Jessup. However, DNA evidence subsequently showed that semen stains found on the dress Melissa was wearing, which could not be definitely matched at the time, came not from Jessup, but from the girls' stepfather.

Jessup's defense counsel, "Clever Clive" Royce, mounts a media campaign in his client's favour, and it becomes clear that his main motivation is obtaining a sizable compensation payout from the state. Haller's response is to allow bail and have Jessup tailed by the police in the hope that he will return to his old ways and provide additional support for the prosecution case. Jessup is soon seen visiting various mountain trails in the Mulholland area, and on one occasion parks his car outside Bosch's house at night. Bosch and Haller, both concerned for their own teenage daughters' safety, develop a theory that Jessup was a serial killer but are unable to investigate fully for fear of blowing the police's cover.

Legal procedures require that the jury is kept ignorant of Jessup's post-conviction history. Testimony given in the original trial, where the witness is no longer available because of death or infirmity, has to be read aloud to the jury by Harry Bosch, but the key to the case is still Sarah Gleason's testimony. During direct examination, Sarah admits that the dress Melissa was wearing was hers and that her stepfather was raping her, which accounted for the semen stains. The defense focuses on presenting the stepfather as the real killer and Jessup as the victim of the family's lies. To undermine Sarah's testimony, because of her history of drug use and prostitution in the years since her sister's murder (though she has now been rehabilitated), Haller concludes that "Clever Clive" must have a witness who will claim that Sarah had told a different story during her "lost years." Bosch then traces Sarah's then-lover, Eddie Roman, and finds that he has remained a drug addict living off a prostitute's earnings but has disappeared, presumably to testify against Sarah. Locating Roman's current prostitute Sonia Reyes, Bosch persuades her to enter the courtroom at a crucial moment in Roman's testimony, which causes Roman to alter his testimony and effectively destroys the defense case.

While anticipating a plea bargain offer from the defense team during a lunch break, Bosch and Haller instead learn that Jessup entered Royce's offices with a gun and killed Royce, two of his legal team and a policeman who followed him. Jessup is now at large, but the police surround and kill him at a hideout under the Santa Monica pier that had been discovered by Bosch as a result of the police surveillance activities. Jessup's death ends the search for Melissa Landy's killer, but leaves the prosecution team with a host of unanswered legal and moral questions.

The Fifth Witness

Haller is called on to defend a long-standing client, Lisa Trammel, when she is suspected of murdering wealthy Mitchell Bondurant.^[1]According to forensic evidence, the victim, who was six-foot-two, had been murdered with a hammer blow from behind, on the very top of his head, while standing up.

Haller and his staff (including his ex-wife, Lorna Taylor, and his investigator and Lorna's husband, Dennis "Cisco" Wojciechowski) work on demolishing the prosecution case, led by Andrea Freeman, against whom Haller has never won. On discovering the probable involvement of the murder victim with organized crime, Haller concentrates on establishing alternative suspects as well as relying on the forensic evidence which suggests that Trammel is physically incapable of the crime.^[2]

Haller's case hinges on the testimony of a witness whom he manoeuvres into taking the Fifth Amendment on the witness stand, thus creating a plausible alternate killer for the jury (making him both the fifth witness in sequence and the "Fifth" witness). Before Haller can detail Opparizio's crime connections in open court, the witness takes the Fifth, ending his testimony. The judge instructs the jury to disregard the entire testimony, but Haller's last witness, Cisco, presents evidence that causes the jury to acquit Trammel.

In a final twist that introduces "a moral dimension" into the case, Haller realizes that Trammel is guilty. He confronts her, and is shaken by her indifferent response. Three weeks later, Haller's law practice is booming as a result of the trial, when he gets a call from Trammel, in which she both accuses him of tipping off the police to dig up her garden and begs him to represent her when she is tried for her husband's murder. He refuses, telling her that he has just filed to run for Los Angeles County district attorney because he no longer wishes to associate with people like her.^[3]

The Drop

The book was mentioned in a February 2011 interview, where Connelly explained that Bosch would be "handling two cases at once, a cold case that turns hot and the politically charged investigation into the death of a city councilman's son. The city councilman happens to be Harry's old nemesis, Irvin Irving."^[2]

Irving involves Bosch because, despite his personal antipathy, he believes he is a dedicated detective who will find out the truth no matter what; he is nevertheless unwilling to believe Bosch when the evidence points to suicide. Concurrently, while involved in the cold case investigation, Harry meets and falls for therapist Hannah Stone.^[3]

At home, Bosch grows closer to his daughter Maddie, now fifteen years old and expressing an interest in a law enforcement career.

The Black Box

Bosch tackles a 20-year-old cold case which took place during the 1992 Los Angeles riots. A white photojournalist is found killed near a burned-out store. The case is reopened when Harry matches a shell casing he discovered at the scene to three other murders. In his personal life, Harry's daughter Maddie says she wants to become a member of the LAPD, after having expressed an interest in a law enforcement career in The Drop.

The Gods of Guilt

Harry Bosch and his rookie partner Lucia Soto are assigned the case of Orlando Merced, a mariachi performer who was shot in a crowded Los Angeles square and was paralysed from the waist down. The shooter was never found, and Merced survived for ten years before dying from complications from his wounds. When the bullet is finally removed from his body, Bosch establishes that Merced was shot with a hunting rifle, and that the crime was not a random act of gang violence as originally suspected, but a targeted hit. This new evidence leads Bosch to one of the city's most powerful businessmen and a controversial former mayor with aspirations of becoming Governor.

Meanwhile, Bosch notices strange behavior from Soto and begins to suspect that she has gang affiliations and has infiltrated the LAPD. After catching her carrying out an off-the-books investigation, she reveals that she is a survivor of a notorious apartment fire that killed nine children, but remained unsolved after a key suspect disappeared without trace. Bosch fabricates a connection to the Merced case to protect Soto, and the two investigate the fire parallel to the Merced case. The trail leads them to a series of robberies across Greater Los Angeles that the FBI believe were used to fund a white supremacist militia group, and ultimately to a witness hiding in a convent on the Mexican border.

Over the course of the story, Bosch wrestles with the knowledge that his retirement is imminent and makes it his mission to train Soto to take over in the Open-Unsolved Unit. Ultimately, he is caught breaking into the Robbery Homicide Division offices as part of the Merced investigation and is placed on indefinite suspension pending an investigation. With less than a year until his retirement, he leaves Open-Unsolved knowing that he may never return.

Two-story novel for Harry Bosch: he's summoned by a certain Whitney Vance who wants to know if he has left a heir to his fortune.

He investigates and finds he actually had a son, Dominick Santanello, whose mother was a Vibiana Duarte, who was Whitney Vance's lover back in the fifties; Santaniello was killed in Vietnam, though; so Bosch has to inquire further only to find he had had a daughter form another latino woman, whose name is Vibiana, after her grandmother; Vibiana Veracruz is alive and active as an artist and a sculpture.
Bosch discovers that the will in which the main heir was supposed to be her maid, Ida Forsythe, was actually falsified by the same Ida, who eventually killed Whitney to get rid of traces of her crime.
When Bosch - with the help of Mickey Haller, nails her, the whole heritage goes to Vibiana Veracruz.

The parallel crimes he's investigating are  those perpetrated by a serial rapist who goes by the name of Screen Cutter who Bosch unveils to be one of their cop partners, Dockweiler, who he shots before he manages to kill Bella Lourdes.

In the end Bosch gets back to the Department full time, taking the very place of Bella, not before promising her the position will go back to her whenever she wants to.
 

Renee Ballard, Connelly's new heroine, is struggling with a triple investigation:
Leslie Ann Lantana is robbed of her credit card; Ramona Gutierrez is brutally beaten and left almost dead on the ground; : Ballard traces the perpetrator as a gun dealer as nails him; his name is Christopher Nettle.

Ever since her partner, Detective Ken Chastain, failed to back up her sexual harassment claim against Lt. Robert Olivas, her supervisor at the Robbery Homicide Division, Renée Ballard has been banished to the midnight shift—the late show. She’s kept her chin down and worked her cases, most of which are routinely passed on to the day shifts, without complaints or recriminations. But that all ends the night she and Detective John Jenkins, the partner who’s running on empty, are called to The Dancers, a nightclub where five people have been shot dead. Three of them—a bookie, a drug dealer, and a rumored mob enforcer—are no great loss, but Ballard can’t forget Cynthia Haddel, the young woman serving drinks while she waited for her acting career to take off. The case naturally falls to Olivas, who humiliatingly shunts Ballard aside. But she persists in following leads during her time off even though she’d already caught another case earlier the same night, the brutal assault on Ramona Ramone, ne Ramón Gutierrez, a trans hooker beaten nearly to death who mumbles something about “the upside-down house” before lapsing into a coma. Despite, or because of, the flak she gets from across the LAPD, Ballard soldiers on, horrified but energized when Chastain is gunned down only a few hours after she tells him off for the way he let her down two years ago. She’ll run into layers of interference, get kidnapped herself, expose a leak in the department, kill a man, and find some wholly unexpected allies before she claps the cuffs on the killer in a richly satisfying conclusion.

Ballard going to Thomas Trent to buy a car
The Library meeting Castor-Feltzer
How Ballard f**s Carr sending him to arrest Olivas

Bob Tascott and Alex Kennedy, who now work for Lucia Soto, former colleague of Harry Bosch, inform the detective that an enquiry is being carried on against him for having tampered the evidence against Preston Border, a guy Bosch sent to prison for murder 30 years before.
It seems another guy, John Olsen, left his DNA in the body of the victim, Danielle Skyler.
Bosch calls Haller to defend him in court and Haller immediately starts to investigate, discovering that Legal Siegel, one of Border's lawyers, is still alive; and Lucia Soto sends him the video of the detectives sealing the evidence box.
Cisco, Haller's detective, sees a guy in the background of the video and searches him; it is Terence Spencer; multiple investigations carried on by Bosch, Haller & Cisco together, bring them to find a plot started by the same Spencer together with Cronyn, another lawyer defending Borders; he was in bankrupt and he has contrived a plan against the city of LA to get money from them implying a policeman (Bosch) had tampered the evidence.
Haller brings the case to court without the opposition knowing he had proofs; so when the final statements are made, he discovers all the cars against the plot; Borders, who was sitting in the witness box, explodes against Kennedy, declares the swindle and the case is dismisses.

Together with this plot, Bosch has to solve another crime; a double killing in *The Farmacia*.
Pills and drug traffickers are suspected, so Bosch goes undercover to unmask them; he pretends he's an addict and he flies in a plane carrying people who are used by Russian criminals as carriers of shills and drugs.
After a violent fight, Bosch manages to kill them both while still in the plane and then he lands in LA; he also tries to save the life of a young girl who had known while in the mission.

Before the novel ends, we come to know that Bosch is called to solve the case of a young girl murdered years ago and then forgotten: Daisy Clayton; she's going to be the protagonist of next episode.

Cisco: *Who's the guy?*
Bosch in the plane

Dark Secret Night
Harry Bosch has decided to solve the case of Daisy Clayton, as it had been revelead at the end of last novel.
He enters the FBI site to search for documents but he's surprised by Reneè Ballard, who's working at another hot case; a woman killed in her house; soon she gets fascinated by Bosch's old case; furthermore when she comes to know Bosch is presently living with Daisy's mother, a former drug addict.
Together they swerve through a tangle of different cases that point to the direction of the Moonlight Mission, a religious cover used by a et of predators and drug dealers gangs.
They manage to close many circles around the killers, until Bosch is abducted and almost killed by one of them; the FBI manages to free him and finally he discovers the real perpetrators as Roger Dillon, a pornographer.
He makes him confess menacing to melt him in the acid and finally calls one of the victims' father, who comes there with some thugs and kill him.
In the end Bosch asks Ballard to team up with her and she accepts the proposal.