The Wrong Side of Goodbye

Welliver, who portrays protagonist Hieronymous “Harry” Bosch in the Amazon Prime TV adaptation of Connelly’s series, clearly has no problem embodying the tough, almost obsessively dedicated Southern California crime fighter. But the actor’s previous work in supporting roles serve him equally well when dealing with the other characters that inhabit Harry’s literary landscape. Prominent among them in Bosch #21 is reclusive octogenarian billionaire Whitney Vance. In a voice soft and croaky with age and infirmity, he hires Harry as a private detective to find out if he has a living heir from an affair 65 years before. Simultaneously, at the San Fernando PD—where the former LAPD sleuth is stationed as an unpaid reserve officer working under a slow-talking sympathetic police chief and a captain whose speech suggests suspicion and animosity—Harry is assigned the investigation of the Screen Cutter serial rapist. The two cases remain separate, pulling Harry in two directions and introducing him to fellow cops, young and old witnesses, male and female persons of interest, and two very different villains (the smarmy rapist and a sophisticated murderer), all enacted with apparent ease by the versatile Welliver. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Nov.)