Connelly, still one of the best mystery writers out there, has combined two of his characters in this novel. Terry McCaleb, an ex-FBI profiler, now retired and living on Catalina Island following a heart transplant — he has to take over one hundred pills a day — has been asked by an old friend in the sheriff’s department to review some material about the murder of Edward Gunn, a man who had “walked” away from a murder charge several years previously. Harry Bosch, Connelly’s other character, and the one I am most familiar with, was the lead detective on the Gunn case. Bosch had questoned Gunn on the night he was murdered. The murder scene is peculiar, and McCaleb finds an interesting owl replica in the room of the deceased and the Latin phrase Cave Cave Dus Videt (“Beware, beware, God knows”) on the tape binding Gunn’s mouth. His reasoning gets a little bizarre as he connects the owl to a painting by Hieronymous Bosch (Hieronymous is Harry’s given name) and other small details make him suspect that perhaps Harry is Gunn’s killer. He fits the profile, but he knows Bosch and that he is a good cop, so he is afraid that Bosch might be the killer and be good enough to get away with it.Bosch, in the midstof a high-profile murder trial, gets wind of the investigation and is furious, because he fears that the information might be used by the defense to get the otherwise obviously guilty client off. Soon we have two investigators warily circling each other, each wondering about the other. Innocuous-seeming clues become pivotal later on. The integration of the work of Bosch, a great painter of noir if there ever was one, adds to the satisfaction in reading the book even if the reader always knows that neither McCaleb nor Bosch is a bad guy — I don’t really think that’s giving away anything.
