The Closers (Harry Bosch Series #11) »

A former Los Angeles Times crime reporter, Michael Connelly s familiarity with the seamy side of L.A. adds a steamy kind of street cred to his hardboiled, gritty detective novels -- especially his bestselling series of mysteries featuring dark detective Hieronymous Harry Bosch.

He walked away from the job three years ago. But Harry Bosch cannot resist the call to join the elite Open/Unsolved Unit. His mission: solve murders whose investigations were flawed, stalled, or abandoned to L.A.'s tides of crime. With some people openly rooting for his failure, Harry catches the case of a teenager dragged off to her death on Oat Mountain, and traces the DNA on the murder weapon to a small-time criminal. But something bigger and darker beckons, and Harry must battle to fit all the pieces together. Shaking cages and rattling ghosts, he will push the rules to the limit-and expose the kind of truth that shatters lives, ends careers, and keeps the dead whispering in the night....

The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley

Connelly, a former reporter on newspapers in Florida and Los Angeles who went straight and started writing fiction about two decades ago, is the real thing: an immensely skilled entertainer who has mastered the requirements and expectations of his genre but also from time to time rises above them. Chandler self-evidently is his muse and occasionally the influence is a bit too blatant, but Connelly writes grown-up novels that -- along with work by the likes of Scott Turow, Elmore Leonard and John Grisham -- remind us that the place to look for serious American fiction is not in the schools of creative writing but out there in the real world.