Detective Harry Bosch finds himself suspended from duty after he gives his immediate superior a bit of a beat down. It's right after the big Los Angeles earthquake and his home in the Hollywood hills has been condemned, so he has to surreptitiously live in it while avoiding inspectors who want to oust him. All in a day's work for one of the most damaged and haunted protagonists in contemporary American crime fiction. He utilizes the time to reopen the decades-old cold case of the murder of his own mother, a Hollywood prostitute, and immediately finds a way to begin stepping on lots of toes. The man never leaves well enough alone.

At the outset I felt I wasn't going to be drawn in by this story, but once again Connelly surprised me by taking it to places I hadn't expected. Harry Bosch, a morose character who constantly makes the wrong life choices and seems to metaphorically shoot himself in the foot at every opportunity, still manages to win my sympathies and engage me with the basic decency showing through underneath his bitter and hostile crust.