Eighth in Bosch Mystery Series a Crowning Achievement

Michael Connelly is a writer like Alfred Hitchcock was a filmmaker: a popular artist investing the genres of mystery and suspense with new meaning and vivid characters, creating a world of moral choices for the audience to experience along with the hero. Although Connelly has won every major award in the field of mystery writing, his latest book, City of Bones, the eighth in a best-selling series featuring Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch, is his crowning achievement in characterization, action and meaning. 
Characters on continuing TV dramas such as "ER" or "The Practice" become like real people to us. We've seen them laugh, cry and grow in response to their difficulties week by week, just as we might come to know people in real life. And in a well-written book series, such as Connelly's, we gain even more knowledge -- a view into the characters' thoughts, emotions and decision-making processes. Connelly's fictional Harry Bosch, with all his demons, has come to be a cherished friend to many readers, the kind you root for through hard times. And in City of Bones, Bosch is facing some of his hardest -- and perhaps his most momentous -- decisions.
In recent books, he has been wrestling not just with answers to the homicides he's investigating but also with answers to larger questions about life and meaning. At the beginning of City of Bones, Bosch is summoned to the discovery of what appear to be some bones in the woods near a residential area. Bosch expects a false alarm as he's called out several times a year on what turn out to be animal bones. This, however, is the real deal -- 
a 10-year-old boy killed in the woods almost 20 years earlier whose weathered bones are still marked by abuse. 
Bosch's bosses want the case buried -- how can you find a murderer 20 years after the fact? But Bosch is moved by the boy's suffering, and he resolves to solve the case, no matter how difficult it might be to find a suspect. 
His meeting with anthropologist William Golliher also galvanizes another investigation. The scientist has examined victims of violence around the world -- in Chile, Kosovo, even from the World Trade Center. He tells Bosch: 
"It's one of those [cases] where you have to believe that maybe the boy was better off leaving the world. That is, if you believe in a God and a better place than this."
Bosch walked over to a counter and pulled a paper towel out of a dispenser. He started wiping his face again. "And what if you don't?"
Golliher walked over to him. "Well, you see, this is why you must believe," he said. "If this boy did not go from this world to a higher plane, to something better, then ... then I think we're all lost."
Thus the question of meaning, of belief, begins to gnaw at agnostic Bosch in ways it never has before. In the many twists and turns of his investigation, he begins to question his own hope for redemption -- the "blue religion," as he calls it, catching the bad guy and seeing some sort of good triumph. 
He begins to wonder if he's been going about things all wrong. And it leads him to a decision that will shock readers and doubly shock longtime followers of Connelly's work. It's a decision that makes all the sense in the world, but it's also one that will change Bosch's life forever.
 

Dr. Gregory Garrett is associate professor of English and the author of Free Bird (2002, Kensington Books), a 2002 nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. His second novel, Cycling, will be released in fall 2003.