While Lee Child, Sue Grafton, and Joe Nesbo all petered out as they added a new book year after year, Michael Connelly shows no signs of losing his fastball.

Harry Bosch, the irascible and non-conforming LAPD detective, is 70 years old and has retired, but is brought back into police work by his old friend, Renee Ballard who heads a new unit investigating cold murder cases.  She entices Bosch back by offering him the opportunity to work on the Gallagher Family case, the murder of four members of a family including two children killed with a nail gun and buried in the desert outside LA, a case that remained unsolved.

Along the way, Bosch and Ballard solve a series of rape/murders, and Harry closes in on the Gallagher Family killer.  The action is fast and unremitting through all 388 pages which carried me from start to finish in about 24 hours.  Connelly’s lean, vivid prose and the superb characters make reading him a pleasure, and Bosch is the perfect hero, the lone hero standing in the way of evil and chaos.

This is a terrific series from start to finish and if you haven’t discovered any of these 24 Harry Bosch books, treat yourself to one of them.  Doesn’t matter whether you start with #1 or this book. They’re all well written, well constructed, and will help you forget the real world chaos that surrounds us these days.