LOST LIGHT

At the fade of Connelly's City of Bones, his hero, Harry Bosch, said goodbye to the Los Angeles Police Department he'd served loyally but unhappily for nine phenomenally successful novels, raising the question: what now? This new work provides the answer: Harry has embarked on a new career as a private detective. His first case involves a homicide that his LAPD superiors took away from him four years before, the still-unsolved brutal murder of a young woman that has continued to haunt him. He goes about his new business just as zealously and relentlessly as when he wore a badge, but its absence makes his job more difficult, especially when his solo sleuthing pits him against friends and foes on the LAPD, over-zealous anti-terrorist feds and a cadre of vicious killers. Connelly lets Bosch narrate the story, a somewhat hoary private eye device brought up to date by the author's compelling style. Reader Cariou, a veteran of Broadway (Sweeney Todd) and television (Law and Order; Murder She Wrote), has the timbre and talent to capture the sound and the moods of Harry: thoughtful, tough, driven yet surprisingly hopeful. His treatment of the other characters—from a raspy-voiced, paraplegic ex-cop to Bosch's disillusioned former partner Kizmin Rider—is nearly as effective. The quality of the narration plus the added production details—e.g., breaking the cassettes at chapter endings and bookending them with bluesy jazz riffs—result in an intriguing, suspenseful audio noir package, as dark and edgy as its hero-narrator. Simultaneous release with the Little, Brown hardcover (Forecasts, Mar. 17). (Apr.)