Eight years after being forcibly retired from the LAPD in The Burning Room, and now well into his 70s, Harry Bosch is back—sort of. His unofficial, off-the-books partner Renee Ballard has been put in charge of a new Open-Unsolved unit, which is staffed by civilian volunteers supervised by her. Naturally, she recruits her old friend Bosch to the unit.
The lure is the Gallagher Family case, which Bosch describes as his "white whale". The Gallaghers—husband, wife, and two children—were all murdered and buried in the desert back in 2013. The strong suspect was Finbar McShane, Stephen Gallagher's business partner, who stole $800K from the business and disappeared after the family vanished. But Bosch was never able to prove it and in any case, McShane has been on the lam ever since.
Ballard tells Bosch that part of the price of working on the Gallagher case is investigating the Sarah Perlman case. Sarah Pearlman was a 16-year-old girl murdered in her home in 1994. Her brother, Jake Pearlman, is now a Los Angeles city councilman, and Jake is responsible for the Open-Unsolved unit being reopened in the first place. Renee tells Harry that he has to put the Pearlman case ahead of his own.
Tropes:
- The Alleged Car: Multiple references to Bosch's 30-year-old Jeep Cherokee, which he has been driving the entire novel series. Bosch has the window down when meeting Ballard, because the A/C in his car doesn't work anymore.
- The Cameo: Renee calls Bosch's half-brother Mickey Haller, a defense lawyer and Michael Connelly's second most-used protagonist. An innocent man is in prison for a murder actually committed by Ted Rawls, and Renee alerts Haller to this after finding out that the LAPD is going to ignore her evidence to avoid embarrassment.
- Continuity Nod: Every Michael Connelly book after the first one has them. This has more than most.
- Renee has made a sign for the new Open-Unsolved unit with the motto "Everybody Counts or Nobody Counts." This was Harry's mantra, and he is irritated to see it on a sign.
- Harry sympathizes with Jake Pearlman's desire to see his sister's murder solved, remembering how he investigated his own mother's death long ago. That was The Last Coyote.
- Renee has broken up with Garrett Single, her EMT boyfriend from the previous book. She so wants to be rid of him that she has also stopped eating red meat, because Garrett liked to barbecue.
- Harry mentions he knows a guy at the military archives in St. Louis. That's a reference to the very first Bosch novel, The Black Echo, in which he calls to St. Louis and gets some vital info from a service record. (He does in this book, too.)
- Harry and Renee pull into a real estate office, and Harry remembers that it used to be a jewelry store and he was involved in a case where two brothers were murdered there by "bent cops". That was The Crossing.
- Renee remembers how the chief of police personally invited her back to the LAPD at the end of the last book, which was the Cliffhanger at the end of The Dark Hours.
- Keisha Russell, an Intrepid Reporter who covered the cop beat and appeared several times in early Bosch novels, reappears after not being mentioned for many years. She's back on the cop beat and asks a nasty question about Bosch at a press conference. In fact, she calls him a "gunslinger", and when Harry asks where she got that, she says she read it in an old news story about when lawyer Honey Chandler sued Bosch, which was way back in The Concrete Blonde.
- Part of a tragic reveal, when Harry mentions how he found some stolen cesium, which was The Overlook. His cancer has come back and he's terminal.
- Detective Mole: Harry and Renee eventually figure out that this is why Ted Rawls got his friend Jake Pearlman to put him on the Open-Unsolved unit. Rawls killed Sarah Pearlman, and he wanted to keep tabs on the investigation.
- Driven to Suicide: After trying to kill Bosch, Ted Rawls the Serial Killer shoots himself with his last bullet.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Harry and Renee realize who did it when Hastings tells them he donated a kidney to his good friend, Ted Rawls.
- Exact Words: Bosch intimidates Sheila Walsh into letting him in by saying, "I have a warrant." He does have a warrant—a years-old warrant from a completely different and unrelated case.
- Foreshadowing: There's bits of foreshadowing of the ending. Harry says he shaved his mustache because "it was turning white" even though Renee knows it had been white for some time. Other characters make comments about how he isn't looking well. Colleen the supposed psychic observes a "dark aura" around Bosch, something he mentions at the end when telling Renee the truth about his terminal cancer.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: Subverted. Renee zeroes in on Nelson Hastings, Jake Pearlman's chief of staff, because Hastings said something about the 2005 campaign not having any black volunteers and Renee never told him that Laura Wilson was black. But when she confronts him, he smacks her down by answering that when he first heard about the Wilson case from her, he looked it up and saw Laura Wilson's picture in a news story.
- No Name Given: Renee meets the chief of police to brief him before the big press conference. As per Michael Connelly tradition, the chief is not named.
- Old Cop, Young Cop: The "old cop, young cop" dynamic that has been going on between young go-getter Renee Ballard and grizzled vet Harry Bosch since the characters were first paired up gets a tweak in this novel. Harry volunteers for Renee's unit, which makes her his supervisor. She has to upbraid him from time to time for not respecting her authority.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Bosch compares a civilian who pestered him to Mrs. Kravitz, "the busybody neighbor on that old sixties show Bewitched." Ballard has no idea what he's talking about.Bosch: Jeez, I'm old.
- Porn Stache: Renee uses this exact term to describe Harry's mustache, which he has shaved.
- Real-Person Cameo: Another mention of Rick Jackson, a real LAPD cop who's basically the model for fictional character Harry Bosch. Rick is also retired and working for San Mateo County, doing the same thing Bosch is in this book.
- Remember the New Guy?: One might think that the Gallagher Family case, Bosch's "white whale", would have mentioned a merit in The Burning Room, especially since Bosch's forcible retirement at the end of that book meant that he wasn't going to close it.
- The Reveal: At the very end Bosch reveals to Renee the reason his odd actions in not just going after McShane alone and breaking into his home, but leaving goodbye notes for both her and his daughter. His cancer has come back, and he's dying.
- Revisiting the Cold Case: Harry Bosch's specialty. In this novel he's investigating two cases, the murder of a teenaged girl in 1994 and the murder of an entire family nine years ago.
- Running Gag: Renee has developed a Berserk Button about the cop habit of ending a conversation with "Roger that." She cringes after hearing herself do it.Renee: When influencers are saying it on TikTok, it's jumped the shark.
Harry: I don't know what one word of that means. - Serial Killer: Ted Rawls, a volunteer on the Open-Unsolved unit, turns out to be a serial killer with a box of Creepy Souvenirs.
- Surprise Car Crash: Harry, who was tailing Ted Rawls, has lost track of him. Harry tells Renee where to go and is saying "I'll do the—" when Rawls plows into the back of his Cherokee.
- Switching P.O.V.: After The Dark Hours went with Ballard's POV for the whole book and Bosch was on the verge of slipping Out of Focus, this book goes back to flipping perspectives between the protagonists.
- There Are No Coincidences: A DNA match makes a link between the Sarah Pearlman case and the 2005 murder of an actress named Laura Wilson. Renee gets a look at the Wilson crime scene photos and sees a Jake Pearlman campaign button.She had to consider that this was no coincidence and that the connection meant something to the case.
- Title Drop: "Desert star" is the name of a flower that Harry observes growing under a tree at the place in the desert where the Gallaghers were buried.
- Two Lines, No Waiting: A trope used in most of Michael Connelly's later novels. In this one Bosch and Ballard investigate two unrelated cases, the Gallagher Family murder and the murder of Sarah Pearlman.
- Wall Slump: Finbar McShane does this as he's dying, after Harry Bosch kills him.
- Your Days Are Numbered:
- Harry looks up Juanita Wilson, and finds out that she has terminal cancer and hopes to find out who killed her daughter before she dies.
- And The Reveal at the end is that Harry's cancer has spread to his bone marrow and his days are numbered.
