DESERT STAR

5 stars out of 5

I've long been a fan of now-retired Los Angeles Police Department Detective Harry Bosch, with or without his half-brother, "Lincoln Lawyer" Mickey Haller. Another of the characters frequenting the books is LAPD Detective Renee Ballard; quite honestly, I liked her not so much, but since she became a partner of sorts with Bosch in recent books, I've warmed up a bit. 

Here, she pretty much shares the show with Bosch as she recruits him for the newly formed cold case unit she's heading up - and my interest in her is far more toasty. Despite the animosity between the two former LAPD cops, Bosch took her up on the offer, in large part because an old unsolved case of his - the gruesome murder of a family of four - has bothered him ever since he retired. This new volunteer job offers the possibility of bringing closure. But Ballard has other ideas; she's in charge of the unit, and in part to keep her new unit funded, she's hot to trot on the years-ago rape and murder of a city councilman's sister.

Old and not-so-old tensions between the two raise their ugly heads every once in a while, as do a few misgivings about a couple of other members of the new cold case unit (one of whom is an "insist" from the aforementioned councilman's right-hand man). All of those interactions, plus the exhaustive and sometimes dangerous investigative work that's being on on both murder cases, makes for an intriguing, hard-to-put-down book that held my attention throughout. So did an unforgettable, emotion-inducing ending that left me itching to have the next installment on my Kindle - would you hurry that up, Mr. Connelly, please?

Desert Star by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown and Co., November 2022); 401 pp.