Monday, May 29, 2017

The Narrows by Michael Connelly


Harry Bosch has retired and it's not sitting well.  Police work is what he knows and what he does best.  When the wife of an old friend calls him he is ready to listen.  Her husband has recently died and she wants Harry to look into it.  Harry knew him from his years in the police force and the friend's work on The Poet serial killer case.  At first Harry believes the death was natural but as he looks into it, he starts to realize that something is amiss.

Rachel Bolling, FBI agent, is also at loose ends.  After her work on The Poet case and the scandal that attached to her that rose from that case, she has been marking time in North Dakota.  When she gets a call to join a team in Nevada that has recently unearthed six male bodies, she knows The Poet has reemerged.  He has left clues that point directly to Rachel and it is clear that he regards their relationship as unfinished.

As Harry works his case, he finds his friend made a mysterious trip to Las Vega before he died.  That and other things takes Harry directly to the burial site where he finds a huge FBI contingent working the case and definitely not pleased to see him.  He is assigned to Rachel to babysit and as the two compare notes, it becomes clear that the two cases have merged and that Harry's friend was perhaps the first victim in this current run of deaths attributable to The Poet.

This was Connelly's fourteenth novel and the tenth in the Harry Bosch series.  Readers will be happy to observe Bosch working a case, this time as a retired detective who has recently discovered he has a daughter and questioning what the rest of his life should consist of.  The tension between Walling and Bosch is interesting and the climax of the novel is stunning.  This book is recommended for mystery readers.

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