ŷ������

5��
�� ‘I’m serious. It’s also against regs. On my part. I’m a D-three. Supervisor level.��

She looked at him a moment. ‘Well, that’s your call, then. I’ll see you tonight. I hope.����

Harry, Harry, Harry. You just can’t seem to resist tempting fate �� or your bosses. She’s supposed to be off-limits, being subordinate to you. And you forgot to be discreet. You are already teetering on the edge with your superiors.

But I think Harry deserves some TLC, and other than being off-limits, new recruit Julia Brasher meets all his criteria. She may be a recruit, but she’s no kid straight out of school. She’s a smart, attractive woman who wants to change her life, so joined the police.

Harry tries to give her the real picture, the terrible crimes he’s seen and the desperate circumstances some people live in. There’s so little police can do.

“That true evil could never be taken out of the world. At best he was wading into the dark waters of the abyss with two leaking buckets in his hands.��

He also can’t resist taking everything personally. It seems that every victim seems to spark a memory. When the weathered bones of a young boy are found by a dog high on a wooded hill, he is immediately struck by the apparent abandonment of someone’s child.

“Child cases haunted you. They hollowed you out and scarred you. There was no bulletproof vest thick enough to stop you from being pierced. Child cases left you knowing the world was full of lost light.��

Harry has spoken before of lost light, what he calls the sensation of being able to see in absolute darkness, as the soldiers felt they did in deep tunnels in Vietnam. They had left real light far behind. He tries to explain to Julia.

�� ‘Lost light. We called it lost light. We never knew where it came from. But it was down there. Like smoke hanging in the dark. Some people said it wasn’t light, that it was the ghosts of everybody who died in those things. From both sides.�� ��

The stark difference in their lives is apparent when Julia talks about her travels around the world.

�� ‘When I was on the road. I spent six weeks in Vietnam. The tunnels, they’re like a tourist thing now.����

The investigation is interesting, but it’s more than that to Bosch. Edgar notices. When the boy’s bones are identified, Bosch refers to the boy by name.

�� ‘Harry, you usually don’t refer to the vic by name.��

‘Yeah, so?��

‘Just pointing it out.��

‘Thank you. Anything else in the file?����

It is easy to get caught up in both Bosch’s enthusiasm when he uncovers a lead and his dismay when it fizzles out. He’s trying to stop smoking, slow down drinking, but it’s hard when these cases grip him. (He does need some TLC.)

He’s not a conventional believer, and the ‘bone guy��, the forensic anthropologist, questions how Bosch can do this kind of work without the faith that is so important to this man.

�� ‘What is the question, Doc? Why do you care so much about me and what I believe or don’t believe?��

‘Because it is important to me. I study bones. The framework of life. And I have come to believe that there is something more than blood and tissue and bone. There is something else that holds us together. I have something inside, that you’ll never see on any X-ray, that holds me together and keeps me going. And so, when I meet someone who carries a void in the place where I carry my faith, I get scared for him.��

Bosch looked at him for a long moment.

‘You’re wrong about me. I have faith and I have a mission. Call it blue religion, call it whatever you like. It’s the belief that this won’t just go by. That those bones came out of the ground for a reason. That they came out of the ground for me to find, and for me to do something about. And that’s what holds me together and keeps me going. And it won’t show up on any X-ray either. Okay?�� ��

It's certainly okay with me.

I will add here that I recently saw the first season of the Bosch TV series. It was only when I recognised some of the plot from The Concrete Blonde (#3), that I looked up the details and discovered that it and City of Bones (#8) and Echo Park (#12) were combined.

I was sorry, figuring it would spoil this book for me since I already knew the storyline, but I wasn’t disappointed at all. In fact, there is a major departure from the book in the TV show, which caught me completely by surprise. Connelly’s writing and characters more than made up for the fact that I knew (or thought I knew), everything that was going to happen.

Another great read, and I will still read Echo Park one day.

Below are my reviews of the earlier Harry Bosch books.
(#1) My review of The Black Echo

(#2) My review of The Black Ice

(#3) My review of The Concrete Blonde

(#4) My review of The Last Coyote

(#5) My review of Trunk Music

(#6) My review of Angels Flight

(#7) My review of A Darkness More Than Night