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

by Michael Connelly

The library of lost souls. Too many for him and Ballard and the others to ever solve. Too many to ever soothe the pain.

CODIS was the national database containing millions of DNA samples collected by law enforcement across the country.

“‘The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.’”

the boss-employee paradigm: Praise in public, criticize in private.

The ocean was as smooth as a fitted sheet on a bed.

there were always more dead ends in a homicide investigation than there were leads that panned out. To him, that was a basic equation of the job. He had once told her it was like baseball. The best hitters failed more than half the time. It was the same chasing leads in homicide work.

“It’s an angry world,” Bosch said. “People do things you’d never expect. That they’d never expect themselves.”

“It’s so easy to forget that there’s great beauty in the desert,”

“Desert star,” Bosch said. “I know a guy, says they’re a sign of god in this fucked-up world. That they’re relentless and resilient against the heat and the cold, against everything that wants to stop them.”