Abandoned by Booklikes

Please note, that this review spoils some events from the previous three books. Do not read further if you have not read the books.

So I keep reading the Harry Bosch books because I love the main character from television and even though Harry continues to be his own worst enemy (seriously though, he is) you can't help rooting for him, even while wanting to slap him upside the head and say be smarter.

Harry is suspended after throwing his commanding officer through a window. Instead of outright firing him, he is forced to go to the department psychiatrist. Initially resentful of feeling like the shrink is there to judge him, Harry starts to take a hard look at his life and realizes what he needs to do to maybe move on is to figure out who murdered his mother. Readers of the series know that Harry's mother was killed when he was 11. After that he bounced back and forth from an orphanage to foster homes until he left for Vietnam. Harry thinks that if he solves his mother's murder maybe he can stop feeling so angry all of the time.

Harry at this point is without a girlfriend (I have never been so happy to see a character go) and does not know what he wants. In his 40s at this point, he is a great detective, but anti-social. And even when he is reaching out to people, he has one fist balled up to deliver a punch if someone tries anything.

What surprised me the most in this book is that Harry feels betrayed when his partner Edgar is assigned someone new and Edgar is not down so much of being used by Harry to go out and find things that can get him (Edgar) fired. I don't really get this partnership at all. Harry seems to have disdain towards Edgar and implies that he doesn't think much of him since he is also selling houses on the side. And in this book, Harry is upset about him moving on. I think it galled me when Edgar actually apologized. Harry is a pretty shitty friend. Period.

I enjoyed the new character of Carmen Hinojos who is the psychologist for the Los Angeles Police Department. There was finally someone who pushed at Harry and called him on his B.S. Repeatedly. Frankly the character needs more of that. I also think that she genuinely cared about him.

The writing was good, it really is just Harry doing a lot of deductive reasoning, interviewing people, and doing what he can to screw with Lieutenant Pounds as much as possible while doing it. I also think it's great that Connelly shows that sometimes Harry is not the smartest one in the room (Irving always has his number).

I thought the flow was a bit off here and there, not too bad, just a couple of times.

The setting moves from Los Angeles to Florida (Tampa) and I didn't get a sense of Florida here at all. Maybe because Harry is hell-bent on his mother's case. But Florida felt like a throwaway place where action was taking place.

The ending was bittersweet for Harry and his realization that you can't always get what you want, and even when you do, it still may come at a price.