Desert Star (Renée Ballard, #5; Harry Bosch, #24; Harry Bosch Universe, #37)

by Michael Connelly

OPEN-UNSOLVED UNIT Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts Bosch shook his head. Everybody counts or nobody counts was the philosophy he always brought to homicide work, but it was also his personal philosophy.

Counting the years of war and police work, Bosch had been looking at the unnatural cause of death for more than half a century.

He had lost much of his faith in the goodness of people. To him the violence wasn’t the departure from the norm. It was the norm.

“You know what that is?” Bosch asked. “Sure,” Orestes said. “This one’s called the desert star.”

“You know, you always struck me as the kind of guy who would do it even if they didn’t pay you.”

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.’” “MLK, right? Let’s hope he was right.”

He thought about Laura’s humble beginnings in the blond-brick house and the dream that took her to L.A., only to have everything she had and had hoped for taken away. It made Bosch angry. He felt an old familiar fire start to burn inside.