Desert Star
Author: Michael Connelly
Publisher: Jonathan Ball
Like comfy slippers or a favourite old T-shirt, catching up with an old friend is one of the more satisfying parts of life.
So it was when reconnecting with Hieronymus Bosch, or as he is known to his few friends and many enemies, Harry.
The retired LAPD detective is lured back to the job by one of those friends and former colleague Renée Ballard, recently appointed to form a team of volunteers to investigate some of the city’s cold cases.
It’s being driven by a local politician whose sister was raped and murdered, and he wants the killer caught.
If the team can find the perp and bring him to justice, the political goodwill could keep the unit afloat to help many other families of murder victims still waiting for answers.
Ballard dangles a big carrot to entice a reluctant Bosch: if he will join the team and apply his immense detective skills to that case, Ballard will free him up to chase one of the cases that still haunts him years later.
The Gallagher family, a couple and their young children, were executed with a nail gun which was thrown into their shallow grave in the Mojave desert.
The family had been “missing persons” for years before being discovered, and Harry retired before the case could be closed.
But he always had one suspect, a man who vanished soon after the family disappeared. Now he has another shot at the suspect, but he first has to find who killed the councilman’s sister.
As usual with Bosch, it doesn’t take him long to buck authority, rub people up the wrong way and make waves. But his spidey senses are twitching and there are soon new leads to follow.
Bosch’s unconventional sleuthing made him my favourite right from the start of the series of novels about him, and he has remained there. Thankfully, Bosch has avoided being tainted by the TV series like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher was by the author insisting on the badly miscast Tom Cruise for the main role in the Reacher movies.
Titus Welliver as Bosch is a perfect match and, if anything, contributed to Bosch’s status as my favourite detective.
The Independent on Saturday