The Burning Room

An autopsy opens Edgar-winner Connelly’s superb 19th Harry Bosch mystery (after 2012’s The Black Box). Orlando Merced, a mariachi musician, was transformed into a symbol for urban violence by an opportunistic mayoral candidate when he was wounded a decade earlier, a random victim of a drive-by shooting. Merced’s death prompts a reexamination of the case, and Bosch and his young new partner, Lucia Soto, get to work. With his usual deftness, Connelly links the Merced shooting to an act of arson—an apartment fire that killed nine on the same day—and returns to his perennial themes: local politics, the media, the LAPD’s internecine warfare, and, of course, Los Angeles itself, from the wealthy enclaves of Mulholland Drive to the barrios of East L.A. Bosch is very much of the old school in this high-tech world, but his hands-on tenacity serves him and the case well—just as Connelly serves his readers well with his encyclopedic knowledge and gifts as a storyteller. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (Nov.)