Michael Connelly has been busily carving and hewing a place in modern detective fiction, a place which started as a niche but which is gradually starting to resemble a cave. His novels detailing the cases of his most famous creation, Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch, have become a sub-genre unto themselves, casting a stark, unblinking illumination on the psyches of both criminal perpetrators and the members of law enforcement that is so bright and so clear as to be by turns beautiful and painful to gaze upon. If it is too early, perhaps, to call him the American Dostoevsky, there is certainly no one else working in the genre who comes close to pretending to the title.

CITY OF BONES begins and ends in darkness of both the day and the spirit. A dog, out for an evening stroll with its owner on the first night of the first day of a new year, unearths a skeletal fragment that belongs to a child. Bosch catches the call, and under his direction, more of the skeleton is unearthed. Forensics determines that the skeleton is that of a male, deceased for at least a decade, under 14 years of age and subjected to prolonged, possibly lifelong, abuse. Bosch, almost alone, is determined that the boy to whom these bones belonged not be forgotten and that his killer be brought to justice.

Connelly uses CITY OF BONES as a canvas to further paint the psychological portrait of Bosch, which he has been etching and painting for the past several years, revealing him in dribs and drabs, at times more by implication than by statement. Bosch, in CITY OF BONES, is revealed to be all too human. He is a good, but not great, investigator. Opportunities are missed due to bad guesses, failure to follow through, poor judgment, and mistakes. Bosch, at the same time, is aware of his shortcomings and at times judges himself too harshly. He cannot do everything. Yet, he occasionally makes poor decisions that he could avoid. His affair with a female cop in CITY OF BONES is more than a case of fishing off his own pier; it's a potentially career-ending move, one made more so by the occurrence of a disastrous ending to a relatively simple facet of the investigation. Despite the turbulence that Connelly reveals in Bosch's life, in his soul, Connelly never forgets that there is a mystery at the heart of CITY OF BONES. The investigation and its conclusion are stunning in their execution, presentation, and brilliance.

Longtime readers of the Bosch novels with be left shaking their heads in wonder at the end of CITY OF BONES. Connelly will be publishing an epilogue, of sorts, to the novel in the form of an interview with Harry Bosch on his website (www.michaelconnelly.com) subsequent to the publication of CITY OF BONES. Do not read the epilogue before reading the novel --- reading the epilogue will cause confusion at best, and at worst will result in giving away one of the more startling conclusions of the year. Reading CITY OF BONES will make it worth the wait.

   --- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

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