Connelly is an excellent mystery author whose novels are highly readable if not necessarily memorable.

In this one his main series character, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch, who’s now nearing retirement and working on the department’s cold case squad, investigates a 21-year-old murder whose victim has just died. That is, the victim was paralyzed by a bullet lodged in his spine in an apparently random shooting in the 1990s, and when he eventually dies the coroner declares the ultimate cause to have been the shooting, making it a delayed homicide. The death also makes it possible to recover the bullet, which provides a clue that the original suppositions about the crime were mistaken.

In the meantime, Harry helps his latest partner, a young woman, investigate another cold case involving the unsolved arson of a low-income apartment building in which a number of her childhood friends had died, and she nearly did as well. The two cases proceed in parallel with, I’m glad to say, none of the convenient but implausible connections between them that you might expect.

by