Harry Bosch is dismayed when a comment of his, “Everybody counts or nobody counts”, is seized upon by an upwardly mobile politician. “I like that! … That’s good,” Armando Zeyas, a former Los Angeles mayor with his eye on the governorship, tells Bosch, as the detective reluctantly prepares to brief the press about the developments in a murder investigation. “Bosch couldn’t hide his look of horror,” Michael Connelly drily narrates. “In Zeyas’s mouth it sounded like a campaign slogan.”
It might enrage Bosch when the remark is, inevitably, drafted into political use, but the thought behind it sums up both Connelly’s veteran detective and his creator. Everybody counts. Nobody and nothing is overlooked in the pursuit for truth. “The good ones all had that hollow space inside,” Bosch muses. “The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness for ever.”
Appearing in his 19th novel, with retirement looming, 64-year-old Bosch is working for the LAPD’s open-unsolved unit these days, and dealing with cold cases. There are plenty to go round: “more than 10,000 unsolved murders on the books in the past 50 years”. He is landed with a doozy: a 10-year-old case, in which the victim has only just died. Orlando Merced was a mariachi player who became the unintended target of a shooting. He survived, but the bullet, lodged in his spine, took, eventually, both his legs, his arm, and then his life. His death means the bullet can finally be extracted and examined, giving Bosch and his new partner Lucía Soto new leads, for the first time in a decade, in what is now a murder case.
Soto, 28 and Mexican-American, is the “heroína con la pistola”, making it on to the open-unsolved unit after becoming a media sensation following a shoot-out at a liquor store. The pair work well together, turning up evidence linking the shooting to a decades-old fire in an apartment which killed a group of children.
Connelly has fun juxtaposing Bosch’s old-school tendencies with Soto’s ease with new technologies, an air of melancholy drifting into the detective’s thoughts as he considers how the job is “becoming a deskbound institution”, with “keyboards and cell phones… the main tools of the modern investigator”. “Detectives sat in twelve-hundred-dollar chairs and wore sleek designer shoes with tassels. Gone were the days of thick rubber soles and function over form, when a detective’s motto was ‘Get off your ass and go knock on doors’,” ponders Bosch. And then: “Of course, this being the LAPD, the owners of these chairs had secured them to their desks with bicycle locks when they left for the day.”
There’s room for contemplation, as Bosch looks out over the city from a lead on Mulholland Drive, his thoughts “of murder and the kind of people who pay others to kill their competitors and enemies. The ultimate narcissists who think that the world revolves around only them. He wondered how many were out there among the billion lights that glowed up at him through the haze”. And for humour, as the detective attempts to reconcile himself with his teenage daughter Maddie’s news of a date: “She had not had many. Bosch required her to inform all suitors that her father was a police detective who always carried a gun. It sent the proper message every time.”
Really, though, what Connelly delivers here – as ever – is a slice of classy, clever, page-turning stuff, as Bosch and his excellent new sidekick trace the shadows of years-old crimes whose tendrils stretch through the echelons of LA society and across the sprawl of its geography. The detective is described as a silverback by his boss – “the one that knows the most in the troop. Has all the experience.” Connelly, too, is a pair of eminently safe hands, and The Burning Room is a pleasure to read.
The Burning Room is published by Orion (£19.99). Click here to order it for £15.99
