Burial Grounds

PRIVATE DETECTIVES LIKE CHANDLER'S Philip Marlowe and Macdonald's Lew Archer are a different breed from Bosch. They are poet-detectives, spinning crime into mythology. They travel alone, they think alone, and they speak with an authorial voice, in the first person. Connelly tells his stories in the third person, a technique that levels the playing field between his heroes and his villains, and leaves his character somewhat in the position of a rat in a maze -- in an experiment where all of the scientists have left the building.

When Harry pays a visit to a forensic anthropologist who works at the La Brea Tar Pits, he is shown the caved-in skull of a woman recently regurgitated by the Tar Pits: a 9,000-year-old unsolved murder case. "Bosch looked down at the skull again. He thought about what Julia Brasher had said about his job, about his taking evil out of the world. What she didn't know was a truth he had known for too long. That true evil could never be taken out of the world. At best he was wading into the dark waters of the abyss with two leaking buckets in his hands."

Bosch eventually solves the mystery of the boy's death, but in the process of doing so, more innocent people lose their lives, or just their souls. The case is "solved," but the gray lesson for Harry is that sometimes doing the right thing is wrong. And heroism is just another form of compulsive behavior.

In Bosch, Connelly has created a character so gratingly real that he's impossible to use up. Still, there are indications in the text that City of Bonesmay be the last of the series. If so, it seems only just and fitting that Connelly ends his book in a way that leaves the reader more angry and annoyed with Harry Bosch than ever.

CITY OF BONES l By Michael Connelly l Warner Books 464 pages l $26 hardcover