The Drop

Harry Bosch has been given three years before he must retire from the LAPD, and he wants cases more fiercely than ever. In one morning, he gets two.

DNA from a 1989 rape and murder matches a 29-year-old convicted rapist. Was he an eight-year-old killer or has something gone terribly wrong in the new Regional Crime Lab? The latter possibility could compromise all of the lab's DNA cases currently in court.

Then Bosch and his partner are called to a death scene fraught with internal politics. Councilman Irvin Irving's son jumped or was pushed from a window at the Chateau Marmont. Irving, Bosch's longtime nemesis, has demanded that Harry handle the investigation.

Relentlessly pursuing both cases, Bosch makes two chilling discoveries: a killer operating unknown in the city for as many as three decades, and a political conspiracy that goes back into the dark history of the police department.

"In Connelly's latest, Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch has to deal with two puzzling cases. The first involves DNA evidence from a 20-year-old unsolved rape and murder that matches up with a convict who would have been just eight years old at the time of the crime. The second sees Bosch investigating the death of an influential and overbearing councilman's son, while trying to avoid the police department's internal politics. Len Cariou, who has narrated most of Connelly's recent books, sounds more over-the-hill than appropriate for Bosch, despite the detective's looming age-based forced retirement. Nonetheless, Cariou's performance ably serves this compelling, fast-paced police procedural — even if his croaking voice takes a little getting used to. A Little, Brown hardcover." Publishers Weekly Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.