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DESERT STAR is the 24th book starring Harry Bosch and the fifth starring Renee Ballard. (Harry has appeared in a few more books but not as the primary character.) I am not certain whether it is as good as the previous book featuring these two, “The Dark Hours��, but it kept me reading nonstop and consequently is another five-star read from Michael Connelly.

Ballard is now in charge of a resurrected Open-Unsolved Cold Cases Unit within the Robbery and Homicide Division of the LAPD. Open-Unsolved was the last unit Harry worked in before retiring from the LAPD. Ballard recruits Harry as a volunteer investigator for a team that contains several volunteer members.

There are two independent cases to solve. Ballard is most interested in solving the murder of Sarah, the 16-year-old sister of the city councilman who pushed to get the Open-Unsolved Unit reinstated—a crime that occurred almost 30 years earlier. Bosch is most interested in solving the Gallagher Family murder—a father, mother, and their two young children who were killed 10 years earlier and buried in the Mojave Desert, their bodies found by accident a year after the homicide. Bosch is almost certain he knows who the murderer was—Finbar McShane—but after slowly stealing all the money from Gallagher’s business, McShane disappeared before the bodies were discovered.

The new Open-Unsolved Unit now has many sophisticated DNA techniques at hand to help crack cases and they are able to link Sarah’s killer to another cold case, a 15-year-old murder of a 24-year-old aspiring actress. The majority of the novel focuses on identifying and then hunting down the killer of these two young women. In short sequences, Harry also pursues leads that help him discover where McShane is now living, but this is a fairly minor part of the story until the ending.

There were some things that I didn’t like about the narrative. Most of these had to do with the character development of Ballard. She appears to be turning into a bureaucrat, dealing with politics within the police hierarchy, and leaving the investigative work for others. And we receive no further information about the background circumstances that formed her personality. Compare that with Bosch, whose complex background was developed over several of the early novels in the series.

The one other element that bothered me was tying up the ending. Bosch does something (”Sometimes you do the wrong thing for the right reason.��) and there is no follow up. There should have been some repercussions from Harry’s actions—a long carry-over—but the novel just stopped.

Mostly I kept reading this novel far into the night because of Harry Bosch. His body may be deteriorating but his mind is as sharp as ever. (And I can commiserate with this because I am about ten years older than Bosch.)

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My review for the previous book in this series:
The Dark Hours (Harry Bosch #23, Renee Ballard #4)
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