Review by New York Times Review
what do you do with a tired old cop? You give him a bright young rookie to keep him on the ball. In return for this infusion of energy, the kid gets the benefit of the broad experience and infinite wisdom of the veteran. That's the way it's supposed to work, anyway. But in the burning ROOM (Little, Brown, $28), Michael Connelly's latest Harry Bosch mystery, there's precious little wisdom the L.A.P.D. detective can impart to his new partner, Lucia (Lucy) Soto, about the curious case of a homicide victim who took 10 years to die. While playing in a mariachi band, Orlando Merced was apparently the accidental victim of a gang-related shooting, paralyzed after a bullet lodged in his spine. But it isn't until he dies and the bullet proves to have been shot from a rifle ("A drive-by with a rifle? Come on. Unlikely") that this cold case becomes an active homicide investigation. Since no amount of advanced technology can help when there's no more forensic evidence to process, Bosch takes the opportunity to show his partner how they did things in the old days. More important, he has some pointers on how to avoid the quicksand of departmental politics. Bosch, who's always been a rebel, lucks out with Lucy, since she's something of a maverick herself - secretly working off the clock on a cold case of her own, an unsolved arson in a day care home that took the lives of five of her childhood friends. A master at construction, Connelly finds a way to link the two cases, which burrow deep into Los Angeles's Latino community. But by then nobody's teaching anybody anything because Bosch and Lucy are working closely as a team. As often happens in Connelly's police procedurals, Bosch's meticulously built case is undermined by political corruption in high places, leaving him "suddenly sick to death of everything." But as he has aged, this cynical detective has also mellowed. Sitting in a jazz club listening to a young woman performing a "plaintive and sad" saxophone solo of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" gives Bosch hope that "there was still a chance for him, that he could still find whatever it was he was looking for, no matter how short his time was." IT'S AN IMAGE that's hard to forget: the severed but still clasped hands of two adulterous lovers, buried for years in a cookie tin. That's Ruth Rendell for you, offering a vision that's grim, grotesque and yet strangely beautiful. The extraordinary chain of events in THE GIRL NEXT DOOR (Scribner, $26) commences when these hands are unearthed by workmen digging out a cellar in the London suburb of Loughton. During the war, children used to play here, in the foundations of houses that were never built, and the discovery prompts a meeting of the survivors. Although these childhood friends are now old enough to have great-grandchildren, their further gatherings yield surprising consequences, including one romantic liaison that leads to happiness and another that leads to violence. Rendell makes clever work of a split time frame to transport her characters from the past to the present and back again. But her best, most idiosyncratic study is her portrait of the villain of the piece, a wicked man in his youth and an absolute devil in his dotage, determined to live to be 100 out of pure spite. not every Irish author is in love with the sound of his own voice. There's not much poetry in Stuart Neville's crime novels, which are set in Belfast and read like dispatches from a war zone - terse prose, dark thoughts, raw feelings, THE FINAL SILENCE (Soho Crime, $26.95) offers confirmation that the past is never past in Northern Ireland. Rea Carlisle didn't ask to be the custodian of her Uncle Raymond's nightmares, but that's what she inherits after he commits suicide and leaves his old house and all its secrets to her mother, who persuades Rea to move in and make it her own. But once she breaks down the locked door to the back bedroom and starts reading the entries in her uncle's journal, it's one horror after another. Although this is a more formal mystery than Neville's previous ones, its characters remain possessed by Belfast's old, familiar ghosts. SOPHIE LITTLEFIELD IS a regular writing machine. She churns out romantic novels, young adult novels, post-apocalyptic novels, historical novels and a fun series, set in rural Missouri, about a middle-aged widow who runs a sewing-machine repair shop and does a little vigilante work on the side, dispensing tough justice to abusive husbands, THE MISSING PLACE (Gallery Books, paper, $16) is something else again, a disturbing tale of two very different women, both anxious mothers, who meet in the remote North Dakota boom town where they've traveled in search of their sons, now missing from the oil rig where they worked. Colleen Mitchell comes from a wealthy suburb of Boston and is so shocked by the primitive living conditions in the oil fields that she's barely able to function. Shay Capparelli, the scrappy woman who rescues her, has better survival skills and is less inhibited about challenging the big oil company that's intent on stonewalling them. The two mothers are the unlikeliest of buddies, but when they learn how to work together they're positively ferocious - and as brave as any of those macho guys up on the rigs.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [November 2, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Harry Bosch has retired from the LAPD before and then come back, but this time it appears he's played out his string. So when Harry is paired with a rookie detective in a cold case like no other the victim of a nine-year-old shooting has only now died, leaving the detectives with a warm corpse and a cold investigation he's tasked with a dual charge: find the killer and train the newbie, Lucy Soto, who has an agenda of her own. As a child, Soto, an orphan, was trapped in a burning building and watched many of her friends die before she was rescued. No one was ever arrested for the arson, and Lucy is out to solve her own cold case against the rules and off the books. Harry, who has never seen a rule he wasn't willing to break, agrees to help his new partner, if she agrees to put their real case first. That becomes considerably easier to do when it appears the two may be connected. Ah, but there's a rub: the trail leads to what Bosch calls high jingo, political considerations that mean interference from the big bosses. By putting the emphasis on the training of a young detective, Connelly shows us a side of Bosch we tend to de-emphasize, stressing instead his maverick attitude and his battles against inner demons. Harry is also a damn good detective, eschewing databases and cell phones to do his investigating by following the old-school motto of Get off your ass, and go knock on doors. Sadly, door-knocking doesn't always win in the face of high jingo, or even garden-variety bureaucrats, and if the Bosch series teaches us anything, it's that hard work is often its own and only reward. That's the real lesson Bosch must teach Lucy and he does it in grand style. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Connelly's 26 novels have sold more than 58 million copies worldwide, proving that crime-fiction fans love a maverick.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this latest entry in Connelly's long-running Harry Bosch series, the driven detective, with only a year left before retirement, is assigned a new partner-a rookie named Lucia Soto-whose dedication to the job convinces Harry to become her mentor. Together they take on the cold case of a man who died of a lodged bullet from a gunshot 10 years earlier. But over the course of the investigation Harry discovers a hidden agenda of Lucia's. Reader Welliver, who stars as Harry in the upcoming TV series, presents the third-person narration in a strong, no-nonsense manner, while catching every obsessive, blunt, impatient, hard-charging, department politics-hating, justice-demanding aspect of Harry's dialogue and attitude. He distinguishes among side characters through their moods rather than creating unique voices or accents for each. There are disgruntled beat cops, angry captains, aggressive criminals-a cool female coroner here, a sly politician there. For the novel's other main character, Lucia Soto, Welliver lightens his tone only slightly, adding an affected eagerness that, on occasion, can harden into an iron determination to get the job done. Just the type of partner Bosch can appreciate. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Orlando Merced is finally dead from the bullet that struck him in the spine and paralyzed him a decade ago as he played with his band in Los Angeles's Mariachi Plaza, and the LAPD's Open-Unsolved Unit has caught the case. Such investigations are rarely straightforward, but soon detectives Harry Bosch and his new partner, "Lucky" Lucy Soto, discover that the victim had ties to a mayoral hopeful, putting a political spin on their probe. Bosch has never had patience for political machinations, interoffice or otherwise, and he must juggle this complication along with an inexperienced and untested partner. Bosch finds himself in shark-filled waters with a murder case that turns out to be about much more. His love for the job and for the City of Angels, warts and all, and his fierce sense of justice are among the many things that make this series great. VERDICT Connelly's (The Gods of Guilt) exceptional gift for crafting an intricate and fascinating procedural hasn't faded a bit. Our protagonist remains, after 19 books, one of the most intriguing creations in crime fiction, even as he faces his impending retirement. A humdinger of an ending will have readers anxiously awaiting the next book. [See Prepub Alert, 5/12/14.]-Kristin Centorcelli, Denton, TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The latest and most intricate of Harry Bosch's cold cases (The Black Box, 2012, etc.) begins with a victim who's still cooling off in the morgue.Orlando Merced was shot 10 years ago by a sniper who fired into his band, Los Reyes Jalisco, as it played on Mariachi Plaza. He's just now died of blood poisoning, but the coroner's office is calling it murder, since the cause was the bullet that's been lodged in his body all these years. Ex-Los Angeles mayor Armando Zeyas, who can't resist grandstanding on behalf of the dead man who played at his wedding, offers a $50,000 reward guaranteed to bring the crazies out of the woodwork, and one of the callers tells Bosch's very junior new partner, Detective Lucia Soto, that the shooting is linked to a 1993 fire at the Bonnie Brae apartments that killed nine victims, most of them children. Since Soto survived that fire as a child and had friends who didn't, she comes to full alert when the anonymous tipster claims Merced was killed because he knew who set the fire. The two crimes are both linked, it turns out, to another crime, the violent robbery of an EZBank the same day as the Bonnie Brae arson. Though the felonies may be ancient, Connelly (The Gods of Guilt, 2013, etc.) maintains a rapid pace, steadily increasing the tension even after the solution becomes obvious. Following Bosch's trail is like watching Lew Archer in the glory days of Ross Macdonald, except Connelly's focus is social, political and ultimately professional rather than psychological. Expect Bosch to uncover a nest of vipers as powerful as they are untouchable, but don't expect him to emerge from his Herculean labors a happy man. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
