Harry Bosch, our old friend and trusty detective is back again. This time, not only fighting murderous drug cartels, but defending his own honour in a 30 year murder case he investigated.
A father and son in San Fernando have been brutally shot and murdered in their Farmacia, and Bosch has been assigned the case. He works as a volunteer with the San Fernando police department, alongside Bella Lourdes. Whilst working the case, his old partner Lucia Soto turns up and tells him that a 30 year old case, which sent a man to death row has been brought to the attention of the Conviction Integrity Unit.
The CIU is what it sounds like – they investigate criminal convictions to determine if there has been a miscarriage of justice. It looks as though the man sent to prison for the crime of murder back in the 80’s, Preston Borders, is accusing another inmate of the crime. The other inmate happens to now be dead, so can’t answer the accusations himself. Basically, Borders is saying the Bosch framed him and Harry needs to prove otherwise.
We all know that Harry didn’t do it, because we are about 20 books in to the Harry universe and know that he just wouldn’t do that. So the story is how he can prove his innocence, when the CIU seems to have indisputable DNA evidence to prove the dead inmate did the crime Borders is on death row for.
So we have the old case, being worked alongside the new one and Bosch gets sent undercover for the new one to try and find the baddies who killed the two Farmacia workers.
Connolly’s stories are always superb, there isn’t much to say about them other than that. His writing is excellent as usual and the characters are by now all familiar to us. His ethos of ‘everybody counts or nobody counts’ is echoed throughout the story and evident in a couple of his interactions with the drug addicts he meets along the way.
What I realised when reading this story, is how old Bosch is in it. I have him in my head as around 50, in all the books, even though I know they span a really long time. You know how a character just stays the same way forever? But it is brought home to us that Bosch is now an old man – he’s over 65. I think I would have preferred to not have been reminded of this fact in the book – so I am just going to forget about it!
All in all a great read, one I recommend!
Happy reading!
Becca x
The Beautiful Book Break 