Lost Light (Harry Bosch Series #9)

USA Today

Connelly's skill as a prose craftsman remains in full force. He writes about Los Angeles and its environs as poignantly and beautifully as anyone since Nathanael West: — David Montgomery

The New York Times

Despite some shockingly sunny developments in his personal life, Bosch wears his depression like armor, making him the perfect hero for our paranoid age. — Marilyn Stasio

Booklist

What Connelly does so well in this series is to contrast Harry's desperate need to play the role of the avenger with his growing realization that what he must do to play that role has alienated him from the human intimacy he craves. It isn't an uncommon theme in hard-boiled novels, but Connelly manages to rub it raw in a way that others can't quite equal. It's never pretty watching Harry edge toward connection with those he loves and then back away, drawn by the pain of others, but it just may be the most compelling train wreck in crime fiction.

The Washington Post

As always, Connelly does many things well. He has internalized police procedure and the way cops think; he knows them as well as he knows himself. His prose is increasingly lean and muscular, although he offers an occasional homage to his first hero, Raymond Chandler, as when he writes of Hollywood: "It was a place of takers and users, of broken sidewalks and dreams. You build a city in the desert, water it with false hopes and false idols, and eventually this is what happens. The desert reclaims it, turns it arid, leaves it barren." His plot, so seemingly straightforward, builds to a series of surprises, both in the investigation and in Harry's personal life. In novel after novel, Harry has been trying to save his soul, and as this one ends he finally, unexpectedly, has salvation in his grasp. — Patrick Anderson

The Baltimore Sun

Harry Bosch is back. Like his creator, he never disappoints. In Lost Light, Michael Connelly ventures into new territory by having the taciturn Bosch narrate the story. It takes nerve and skill to tinker with a formula as successful as the Bosch series. Happily, Connelly has plenty of both. … Lost Light has all of the ingenious plotting and skillful writing that are Connelly's hallmarks.

Publishers Weekly

At the fade of Connelly's City of Bones, his hero, Harry Bosch, said goodbye to the Los Angeles Police Department he'd served loyally but unhappily for nine phenomenally successful novels, raising the question: what now? This new work provides the answer: Harry has embarked on a new career as a private detective. His first case involves a homicide that his LAPD superiors took away from him four years before, the still-unsolved brutal murder of a young woman that has continued to haunt him. He goes about his new business just as zealously and relentlessly as when he wore a badge, but its absence makes his job more difficult, especially when his solo sleuthing pits him against friends and foes on the LAPD, over-zealous anti-terrorist feds and a cadre of vicious killers. Connelly lets Bosch narrate the story, a somewhat hoary private eye device brought up to date by the author's compelling style. Reader Cariou, a veteran of Broadway (Sweeney Todd) and television (Law and Order; Murder She Wrote), has the timbre and talent to capture the sound and the moods of Harry: thoughtful, tough, driven yet surprisingly hopeful. His treatment of the other characters-from a raspy-voiced, paraplegic ex-cop to Bosch's disillusioned former partner Kizmin Rider-is nearly as effective. The quality of the narration plus the added production details-e.g., breaking the cassettes at chapter endings and bookending them with bluesy jazz riffs-result in an intriguing, suspenseful audio noir package, as dark and edgy as its hero-narrator. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Forecasts, Mar. 17). (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Harry Bosch has retired, but he can't keep from taking on one last case. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-After more than 25 years with the L.A. Police Department, recently retired Harry Bosch decides to finish the murder investigation of Angella Benton, a case he had been quickly pulled off more than four years earlier. Gaining additional background information from a former colleague, now a quadriplegic as a result of having been shot during the investigation, Harry begins contacting any and all of the people who could have facts pertaining to the crime. He believes that the murder is tied to a film scene and $2 million in cash, and that the entire caper was ingeniously set up well in advance. With dogged determination, he risks his life more than once to prove his theory correct. Connelly expertly weaves the many complex story parts together, resulting in an action-packed ending. As in real life, all aspects of the case must be researched thoroughly, and the bulk of the novel involves the time-consuming, labor-intensive effort that goes into finding answers. Several subplots-including ones involving jazz, Harry's ex-wife, and another murder-help to round out characters, inject other interests, and relieve the intensity of solving the murder. Young adults who read true crime and forensics, or who are interested in police procedures, will surely pick this one up.-Pam Johnson, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Retired from the LAPD’s Hollywood Division, Harry Bosch (City of Bones, 2002, etc.) has taken out a p.i.’s license—a lucky thing, because a hailstorm of backlogged felonies is about to come his way. The edge of the wedge is the unsolved strangling of Angella Benton, an underling at Eidolon Productions. Harry had worked the case for only a few days before it was snatched away from him by Robbery-Homicide, whose investigators linked the killing to a more high-profile crime only a few days later—the theft of $2 million on a one-day loan to an Eidolon-produced movie and the shooting of the security chief responsible for minding it—before running out of leads. Now Lawton Cross, one of the two Robbery-Homicide dicks, paralyzed in still another shootout that left his partner dead, has dredged up an intriguing fact that’s never been made public: An FBI agent tracking marked currency had called Cross’s partner to tell him that one of the bills reported stolen in the Eidolon heist had already been seized by police in an unrelated case. What makes this lead especially hot is that the agent in question vanished only a few days after making the call, and that a second allegedly stolen bill has been traced to Mousouwa Aziz, a suspected money courier for international terrorists. It all adds up to a fine mess: an endless chain of felonies, turf battles between the LAPD and the FBI, and real trouble for Harry when the Feebs decide that he’s taken too close an interest in Aziz and come after him with all the new legal powers they’ve been granted since 9/11, and then some. Amazingly, Connelly manages to keep every new curve not only clear but breathlessly exciting. Mystery fans will cherishechoes of The Doorbell Rang and The Long Goodbye, but the best news is that prodigious Connelly hasn’t been content simply to echo his own earlier successes.