Government drone by day and book lover and geek girl by night!
This honestly could have easily been a Bosch and Haller book since we get a lot of interactions between Bosch and his half brother, Mickey Haller (the Lincoln Lawyer). However, Connelly keeps the focus on Bosch throughout the entire book. I honestly could not give this more than 4 stars though. I think if Connelly had focused more on Bosch's prior case that would have made the book stronger. Instead Connelly flip flops between two story-lines and only somewhat redeems the one story-line though the other one is pretty much left flapping in the wind somewhat. We do have frequent callbacks to prior characters and book so I really would not try to read this one unless you have read the other books in the series.
Bosch is working cold cases with the San Fernando Police Department. That changes when two people are murdered at a pharmacy, the first time in some time that there has been a double homicide that the local force has worked. On top of that, an old case that Bosch worked decades ago comes back to the forefront when DNA clears a man who is on death row for the crime. Bosch's old partner Lucia Soto is working the case, but Bosch worries that there is a fix in somewhere that he can't see.
In this book we get an age check on Bosch (someone asks him if he is 65 or older and he goes yes) which makes me wonder how much longer Bosch can keep going. At this point his daughter is in her second year of college (do not ask about Maddie's ever weird age thing, at this point she should be done with school) and Bosch is just making as much money as he can to provide for her some day.
Bosch has not had a love interest in a long time, but this book introduces a character that resembles Bosch's dead ex-wife that I could have done without. Bosch once again gets obsessive about something that does not look good on him. And he ignores all of the advice he is getting about it.
I was happy to see references to some of Bosch's former partners considering how many were treated terribly by Connelly (IMHO). We actually do not only get Lucia Soto in this one, but also J. Edgar. I don't know, I think Connelly still writes the character of J. Edgar piss poor in my opinion. Writing an African American character as lazy just bugs me a bunch and the fact that we have Bosch still acting as if J. Edgar is somehow not as good as he is...eh. I like television series Bosch and J. Edgar way more than the book versions.
We also get to see Bosch and Haller for once not acting like adversaries, or at least Bosch seems to enjoy him a lot more in this one. I loved all of the legal aspects of the former case that Bosch brings Haller in. We also get Bosch working with Cisco which was welcomed. I really do wish that Connelly had resisted the urge to go and shit all over the two brothers relationship in the end, but nope, we had to end things on a sour note.
The writing was typical Connelly, we get Harry's POV throughout. As I said above, having two plots affected the book in my opinion. When Harry goes off to work the double homicide the book slows down considerably. We get many characters railing against the opioid crisis in America and dirty pharmacies and Big Pharma and it just got boring after a while. The flow was impacted too from bouncing from both story-lines. The book picks up again when we get a final courtroom scene which made me long for another Mickey Haller book. I think I enjoy the character of Mickey more than Bosch, cause at least Mickey sees all the angles and plays them. Bosch pretends to be all noble and right, but he goes around bending a lot of things in order to help out a character so hard shrug to him.
The ending leaves Bosch a bit rudderless when a cold case he is working comes to an end. He decides to see if he can get back to working with LAPD on a cold case, but I don't see how that is going to happen based on all of the things that went down with Bosch and the LAPD in prior books.