Lone LAPD detective Harry Bosch must walk the line between criminals and crooked cops following the death of an old war buddy. Billy had been a fellow "tunnel rat" - fighting with Bosch in the nightmare underground war in Vietnam. But soon Billy's murder is linked to a bank robbery via complex tunnels beneath the bank.

In this fast-paced sequel to The Black Echo, LAPD detective Harry Bosch continues to investigate the drug-trafficking underworlds of inner-city Los Angeles and the wastelands of Mexico. When he discovers the body of a fellow police officer in a sleazy hotel, Harry gets entangled in a brutal web of violence and drugs.

Detective Harry Bosch is back in a breathtaking breakthrough novel, a supercharged thriller that thrusts us into a blistering courtroom battle and a desperate search for a killer who should already be dead. Harry Bosch is sure that the man he killed was the sadistic serial murderer known as the Dollmaker, and that the killing was justified. Even if the dead man's widow wins her civil suit, it's the city of Los Angeles that will pay. Harry has already been exonerated in an internal investigation. The trial - and Harry's certainty that he shot the right man - are torn apart when a corpse is discovered beneath the concrete floor of a building that burned during the L.A. riots. It's the body of a woman, and all indications are that this is another of the Dollmaker's victims. But the autopsy report is unequivocal: this woman was killed after Harry shot the man he believes was the Dollmaker. Into the L.A. night Harry takes his investigation. By day the trial continues excruciatingly, with the prosecuting attorney focusing on Bosch's violent past and portraying him as a vigilante murderer protected by his badge. By night he reinvestigates the infamous Dollmaker case, frantically trying to understand where he went wrong - and what he can do to keep this murderer from carrying out his threats to make Harry his next victim.

Harry Bosch's life is a mess. His new house has been condemned because of earthquake damage. His girlfriend has left him. He's drinking too much. And he's even had to turn in his badge: he attacked his commanding officer and is suspended indefinitely pending a psychiatric evaluation. At first Bosch resists the LAPD shrink, but finally he recognizes that something is troubling him, a force that may have shaped his entire life. In 1961, when Harry was twelve, his mother was brutally murdered. No one was ever even accused of the crime. Harry opens up the decades-old file on the case and is irresistibly drawn into a past he has always avoided. It's clear that the case was fumbled. His mother was a prostitute, and even thirty years later the smell of a cover-up is unmistakable. Someone powerful was able to keep the investigating officers away from key suspects. Even as he confronts his own shame about his mother, Harry relentlessly follows up the old evidence, seeking justice or at least understanding. Out of the broken pieces of the case he discerns a trail that leads upward, toward prominent people who lead public lives high in the Hollywood hills. And as he nears his answer, Harry finds that ancient passions don't die. They cause new murders even today.

Back on the job after an involuntary leave of absence, LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch lands his first case: a Hollywood producer found in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce, shot twice in the head. It looks like "trunk music," a Mafia hit. The LAPD's organized crime unit is oddly uninterested, but Harry thinks they're wrong. He follows the money trail from the producer's office to Las Vegas, where he quickly finds evidence of Mafia involvement. But something about the case doesn't add up, and Harry follows a string of odd clues - glitter in the producer's cuffs, an over-the-counter medication in the Rolls's glovebox - in a different direction entirely. Just when Harry thinks he's on firm ground, the bottom falls out. Blindsided again and again, at odds with his superiors, and overwhelmed by a romance that has cropped up in the middle of the case, Harry is as off balance as he's ever been.

At the foot of Angels Flight, an inclined railway in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, a lawyer is found murdered on the eve of a landmark trial. Howard Elias's lawsuits charging the LAPD with racism and brutality made him a celebrity - even as his success earned him the hatred of nearly every police officer in the city. When Harry Bosch is put in charge of the team investigating Elias's murder he knows that his colleagues are likely to be his chief suspects. He also knows that the city's smoldering racial tensions could ignite if he missteps. As he works night and day in the glare of a major media event, Bosch struggles with a more personally urgent mystery: trying to find out whether his wife's disappearance means she has left him for good or fallen deeper into a dangerous addiction. On streets filled with angry mobs, amid burning buildings and under fire from rooftop snipers, Bosch must find the one answer that will make sense of the case's strangely unconnected pieces - exposing himself to grave danger in the hope of saving his job, his marriage, and his city.

On New Year's Day, Detective Harry Bosch fields a call that a dog has found a bone - a bone that the dog's owner, a doctor, feels certain is a human bone. Bosch investigates, and that chance discovery leads him to a shallow grave in the Hollywood hills, evidence of a murder committed more than twenty years earlier. It's a cold case, but it stirs up Bosch's memories of his own childhood as an orphan in the city. He can't let it go. Digging through police reports and hospital records, tracking down street kids and runaways from the 1970s, Bosch finds a family ripped apart by an absence - and a trail, ever more tenuous, into a violent, terrifying world. As the case takes Bosch deeper into the past, a rookie cop named Julia Brasher brings him alive in the present in a way no one has in years. Bosch has been warned about the trouble that comes with dating a rookie, but no warning could withstand the heat between them - or prepare Bosch for the explosions when the case takes a hard turn. A suspect bolts, a cop is shot, and suddenly Bosch's cold case has all of L.A. in an uproar - and Bosch fighting to keep control in a lawless and brutal showdown.

Fed up with the hypocrisy of the LAPD, Harry Bosch has resigned and is forced to find a new way of life. But the life of a retiree doesn't suit him. He has always devoted himself to justice, and he is still drawn toward protecting—or avenging—those whom the law has failed. When he left the LAPD Bosch took a file with him— the case of a film production assistant murdered four years earlier during a $2 million robbery on a movie set. The LAPD — now operating under post 9/11 rules — think the stolen money was used to finance a terrorist training camp. Thoughts of the original murder victim are lost in the federal zeal, and when it seems the killer will be set free to aid the feds' terrorist hunt, Bosch quickly finds himself in conflict with both his old colleagues and the FBI. He cannot rest until he finds the killer — with or without a badge.

FBI agent Rachel Walling finally gets the call she's dreaded for years: the one that tells her the Poet has returned. Years earlier she worked on the famous case tracking down the serial killer who wove lines of poetry into his hideous crimes. Rachel has never forgotten the killer who called himself the Poet—and apparently he has not forgotten her. Harry Bosch gets a call, too. The former LAPD detective hears from an old friend whose husband recently died. The death appeared natural, but this man's ties to the hunt for the Poet make Harry dig deep — and lead him into a terrifying and unknown world.