LAPD detective Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch team up to hunt the
brutal killer who is Bosch's "white whale"--a man responsible for the
murder of an entire family.
A year has passed since LAPD detective Renée Ballard quit the force in
the face of misogyny, demoralization, and endless red tape. But after
the chief of police himself tells her she can write her own ticket
within the department, Ballard takes back her badge, leaving "the Late
Show" to rebuild and lead the cold case unit at the elite
Robbery-Homicide Division.
For years, Harry Bosch has been working a case that haunts him--the
murder of an entire family by a psychopath who still walks free. Ballard
makes Bosch an offer: come volunteer as an investigator in her new
Open-Unsolved Unit, and he can pursue his "white whale" with the
resources of the LAPD behind him.
First priority for Ballard is to clear the unsolved rape and murder of a
sixteen-year-old girl. The decades-old case is essential to the
councilman who supported re-forming the unit, and who could shutter it
again--the victim was his sister. When Ballard gets a "cold hit"
connecting the killing to a similar crime, proving that a serial
predator has been at work in the city for years, the political pressure
has never been higher. To keep momentum going, she has to pull Bosch off
his own investigation, the case that is the consummation of his lifelong
mission.
The two must put aside old resentments and new tensions to run to ground
not one but two dangerous killers who have operated with brash impunity.
In what may be his most gripping and profoundly moving book yet, Michael
Connelly shows once again why he has been dubbed "one of the greatest
crime writers of all time" (Ryan Steck, Crimereads).
