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Review: Michael Connelly's 'The Burning Room' a series success

 
Author Michael Connelly, right, has brought Harry Bosch to life in books. Next up for Bosch: an Amazon Prime TV series featuring Titus Welliver, left.
Author Michael Connelly, right, has brought Harry Bosch to life in books. Next up for Bosch: an Amazon Prime TV series featuring Titus Welliver, left.
Published Nov. 5, 2014

How do you investigate a murder when it has taken the victim 10 years to die?

That's just one of the knotty problems facing Los Angeles Police Department Detective Harry Bosch in The Burning Room, the compelling 19th novel in an internationally bestselling series. The books are written by Michael Connelly, who has a home in Tampa but sets his books largely in L.A., a city he knows intimately from his years as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. (His other series, about "Lincoln lawyer" Mickey Haller, who is Bosch's half brother, is also set there.)

Bosch has been assigned to the department's Open-Unsolved Unit for a while, usually investigating crimes whose victims are long dead, but his new case has an unusual twist.

Orlando Merced was a musician hanging out in Mariachi Plaza with his band, hoping for a gig one Saturday afternoon a decade ago, when a bullet struck him, lodging so tightly in his spine it couldn't be removed.

Paralysis and loss of three of his limbs followed, and now he has died — as a direct result of the shooting, the coroner rules. No arrests were ever made; the shooting was vaguely attributed to possible gang violence. But Bosch finally has the bullet, and the first thing it tells him is that the random gang drive-by explanation is unlikely.

Bosch, as fans of the series know, is facing retirement soon, but he has a new partner. Lucy Soto is just 28, newly minted as a homicide detective after her heroic actions in a shootout but still learning the investigative ropes. The two are wary of each other, but Bosch is impressed by her ambition, drive and willingness to learn — especially given his sense that he doesn't have much time to pass along his own hard-won wisdom before turning in his badge.

As he often does, Connelly weaves the original case with the investigations of other crimes. One of those is one source for the book's title: an apartment fire more than 20 years before that killed nine people, most of them children. Bosch, whose own career as a police officer was motivated by a crime that had a huge impact on his childhood, will discover that the Bonnie Brae fire plays a similar role for Soto.

Their investigation into Merced's murder takes all sorts of surprising turns, some of which seem to lead to very powerful people. That is the other source for the title — as Bosch tells Soto, when a case seems to be turning white hot, "You never open a door on a burning room."

But open it they do, with some serious consequences. Both cases will lead them all over Los Angeles and beyond, to a Mexican bar in Oklahoma, a white supremacist's compound in the desert, a wealthy businessman's Mulholland Drive mansion. They will dig into the histories of a professional assassin, a prominent Hispanic politician, a Ukrainian banking mogul and a missionary nun. And, as he always does so well, Connelly will keep the tension heating up until we can smell the smoke behind that door ourselves.

Bosch and Soto will find answers in both cases, but they are bitter victories. For readers, though, The Burning Room is a terrifically satisfying trip.