Harry Bosch has trouble holding on to partners. Throughout his long career at the Los Angeles Police Department, Detective Bosch has lost a couple in the line of duty; others have turned out to be crooked or simply incompetent. With retirement looming in “The Burning Room,” Harry has been paired with a 28-year-old detective, Lucia “Lucy” Soto, who shows a lot of promise. In fact, Lucy’s old-school determination to pound the pavement until a case is solved reminds Harry of his younger self. Trouble is, he can’t rid himself of the feeling that there’s “something off” about Lucy — and if there’s one thing he has learned over the years, it’s to pay attention to his hunches.
There’s also “something off” about the murder case Harry and Lucy are assigned to solve. The corpse may be fresh, but the fatal shot was fired 10 years ago. The victim was a mariachi musician who had been hanging out with fellow band members in an outdoor plaza when he was hit by a bullet that lodged in his spine. It took a decade for complications from that injury to end his life and thus shunt the case over to the Open-Unsolved Unit of the LAPD, where Harry and his vexing new partner are hard at work.
Michael Connelly’s novel is a little slow at first, but when the various plots and subplots begin to coalesce about midway through, it becomes a doozy of a tale. Indeed, so venal is the political corruption at the center of this mystery, and so thick-headed the police bureaucrats who (as always) impede Harry’s investigations, that we get intimations of this as Bosch’s last case. Maybe.
As Harry and Lucy begin digging into the cold case of the (tardily) murdered mariachi musician, they unearth possible connections to other unsolved crimes in the Los Angeles area. Among them are a violent bank robbery and an apartment building fire — an act of arson — that killed several children in an illegal day-care center in the building’s basement. (Hence the fiery title of this novel.) Their dogged investigations extend from a dive bar in Tulsa to a dazzling glass mansion perched high above the hills of Los Angeles to a hushed convent near the Mexican border.
As he slogs through interviews and endless paperwork, Harry is haunted by the ghosts of old investigations and memories of the golden age of policing. Staying late into the night to read old reports on the murder, he looks around at the empty squad room:
“[Harry] intermittently got up from his cubicle and walked the length of the room, wandering among the other cubicles. … He noticed that in several of the pods the detectives had gotten rid of the Department-issued, government-grade desk chairs and replaced them with high-end models with adjustable arms and lumbar support systems. Of course, this being the LAPD, the owners of these chairs had secured them to their desks with bicycle locks when they left for the day.
“Bosch thought it was all pretty sad. Not because personal property wasn’t safe in the Police Administration Building, but because the Department was more and more becoming a desk-bound institution. … Detectives sat in twelve-hundred dollar chairs and wore sleek designer shoes with tassels.” Gone were the days of thick rubber soles and function over form, when a detective’s motto was ‘Get off your ass and go knock on doors.’ “
Remembrance of police work past is omnipresent in “The Burning Room.” Harry’s end-of-career melancholia lifts momentarily in the breathless climax, when he and Lucy realize that an error in their deductions may prove deadly, but his depression settles like a coffin lid once the investigation concludes and LAPD bureaucrats and lawyers lumber in to tidy things up.
Perhaps the light at the end of this particularly gloomy adventure derives not so much from arriving at the solution to the murder as from the existence of not one, but two possible female successors when Harry leaves the force for good.
The first and most obvious is Lucy; Harry may harbor some uneasiness about her motives for wanting to be a detective, but he has no complaints about her work ethic or her marksmanship. The other candidate is Harry’s daughter, Maddie, who is enrolled in an extracurricular Police Explorer program at her high school and already knows her way around a shooting range.
Could we be seeing the stirrings of a hard-boiled trend here in which tough-guy detectives pass the torch to their daughters?
Even before Henning Mankell’s Kurt Wallander faded away, his daughter Linda joined the Swedish police force, and perhaps a few years from now, we’ll be reading about the adventures of Maddie Bosch.
As long as Harry always remains patrolling on the margins of this series, its greatness is secure.
FICTION: CRIME
fiction:CRIME
The Burning Room
by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
