In recent years Michael Connelly has been pulling double duty (or triple) as a producer/ screenwriter on hit streaming dramas Bosch, Bosch: Legacy, and The Lincoln Lawyer – each based on books from his outstanding oeuvre – while continuing to craft great new crime novels year after year. Connelly seems to not only be getting busier and busier but is maintaining and even elevating his ‘modern master’ standards as a novelist.

Thirty years on from Connelly introducing readers to Vietnam vet-turned dogged LAPD investigator Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch in The Black Echo, the jazz-loving retiree is approaching a crossroads and feeling all seven decades of his age.

But the opportunity to right a horrible wrong – the unsolved slaying of an entire family – lights a fire for a creaking Bosch, courtesy of Renee Ballard (first introduced in The Late Show), who’s had to battle her bosses and deal with LAPD politics in different ways than Bosch ever did. Ballard offers Bosch a volunteer role in a new cold case unit sponsored by a city councilman still looking for justice for his own sister’s murder, many years before.

Desert Star is a terrific tale, full of tension and intrigue, set against advancing science and worsening perceptions of police departments. Connelly quickly draws readers in and has us eagerly riding along with Ballard and Bosch as the pages whir by.

Reviewed by Craig Sisterson

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