REVIEW: Connelly’s hero dodges bullet while solving 20-year-old case

Danish photojournalist Anneke Jespersen was shot in the face at close range, execution-style, in an alley during the 1992 riots in South Los Angeles. Detective Harry Bosch briefly worked the case at the time, but he and other LA cops were overwhelmed with riot-related murders and other crimes that night.

No one followed up on it. Now 20 years later, the case still remains unsolved.

Bosch is working for the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit and he’s got a chance to return to the Jespersen case. He’d never forgotten it.

	“The Black Box” by Michael Connelly Little, Brown, $27.99, 403 pp.

That’s the premise of Michael Connelly’s latest crime novel starring Bosch, the unrelenting, irascible anti-hero who sees angles others don’t, asks questions others cops won’t, all in an effort to see justice served.

Bosch locates the murder weapon and he connects it to a California National Guard unit that had served in Desert Storm in 1991 and the next year the unit was assigned to the LA riots. Bosch and several guardsmen are in the first pages of the book.

At the same time that Bosch is pursuing leads his bulldog attitude puts him at odds with Cliff O’Toole, the new, by-the-books head of the unit; yes, again, the impolitic Bosch has a habit of offending superiors. Then an internal affairs cop begins looking into a chat Bosch had with a convict after he had interviewed another convict at San Quentin.

Bosch’s cover story is that he taking a week off, putting the Jespersen case on hold and getting O’Toole off his back. Instead, he heads for California’s Central Valley to track down the former guardsmen he thinks he might implicate in Jespersen’s murder and to learn the “why” of her death.

Bosch’s sniffing gets himself in a jam that could spell his own death. An unlikely person saves him.

Twenty years of Connelly’s best-selling Bosch novels haven’t been all about police procedures. Connelly always gives the reader a balancing slice of Bosch’s personal life. These days it’s his relations with his teenage daughter, with a woman he’s dating and his love affair with jazz, especially the late saxophonist Frank Morgan.

Connelly fans will be pleased to know there are plans for a Harry Bosch television series, possibly arriving next year. Stay tuned.

David Steinberg is the Journal’s Books editor and an Arts writer.