Connelly, Michael. The Last Coyote.

Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.

Harry Bosch, the best homicide detective in the LAPD’s Hollywood Division, is also a loose cannon and often his own worst enemy (and all those other clichés). When his lieutenant — a weasely bureaucrat with zero detecting experience — fatally screws up one of Bosch’s cases through willful ignorance, Bosch shoves the man face-first through the glass wall of his office. Now Harry is on “involuntary stress leave,” assigned to sessions with a department shrink, and in danger of losing his job. Relieved of his badge and his gun, he decides to undertake the freelance investigation of a thirty-five-year-old homicide with a strong personal component: The murder of his mother, a Hollywood prostitute, which was never adequately pursued.

It was an event that led directly to Bosch being the sort of angry, driven person he is today, and which he feels guilty for having stayed away from all those years. Freelancing is forbidden by the department, of course, and Bosch has to come up with some ingeniously underhanded, not to say illegal, methods — including lifting his lieutenant’s badge to give himself identity and leverage as he pursues his mother’s case. He also uses the lieutenant’s name when making official requests by phone, figuring the guy has it coming for being such a jerk. (He will come to greatly regret that light-hearted scam.) The case itself soon leads him into high L.A. political circles and Harry makes some serious errors in the process (and knows it). Meanwhile, his sessions with the shrink move slowly from confrontational to semi-conspiratorial and Harry reveals much more of himself than is his habit. And on a trip to Florida to interview the now-retired cop who handled the original case, he meets a woman artist with whom he immediately hits it off — a therapeutic relationship for both of them. This fourth “Bosch” book is fully up to the high standards of the first three, concentrating less on official procedures (which Harry is selective about at the best of times) and more on his own multilayered and often dark personality and how he got there. At the same time, Harry is very much one of the Good Guys and is quite capable to tender feelings for those he comes to care about. The solution to the case caught me by surprise and was justified by the story, though it wasn’t very satisfactory to Bosch himself. (Life is like that.) Connelly is also very good at delineating all the supporting cast, both the continuing characters (like the deputy chief with whom Harry has a mutual carefully respectful relationship) and the one-offs. In his more recent books, Connelly appears to have become a bit sloppy — perhaps coasting on his reputation or simply bored with his characters — but his earlier work is of very high quality indeed.