ANGELS FLIGHT

The murder of a high-profile civil rights lawyer is just the trigger for another far-ranging case for L.A. cop Harry Bosch (Trunk Music, 1997, etc.). Howard Elias was widely known as the man who made a good living by suing the LAPD. So now that he's been shot, along with inoffensive cleaning woman Catalina Perez, aboard an otherwise empty inclined railway car, cops all over the city are cheering. What's not to like? wonders Bosch. Only two things: the likelihood that Elias was helped to his grave by one of the hundreds of officers now toasting his death, and the certainty that the public will scream coverup and react in riotous fury if Bosch turns up anybody but a fellow cop as a suspect. Under pressure to satisfy Deputy Chief Irvin Irving, who's determined to put his own Rainbow Coalition p.r. spin on every development, and to work peacefully with the Internal Affairs officers he's been saddled with, Bosch soon focuses on Elias's latest client: Michael Harris, the scruffy suspect who maintains that his confession in the murder of pre-teen Stacey Kincaid had been beaten out of him by cops who jumped on their first slim lead that came their way. But even as Bosch is turning up evidence that indicates Harris might be innocent after all—many sordid, though unsurprising, revelations here—the net is closing around his former partner Frankie Sheehan, a Robbery-Homicide detective on the Harris case who'd already caught the eye of Internal Affairs when he killed a suspect in an earlier case. Bosch sweats to exonerate his old friend and find a substitute killer, but Deputy Chief Irving, who can't forget O.J. and Rodney King, is just not that interested in getting Sheehan off the hook. Reliable suspense on a grand scale, though the half-hearted attention to the suspects and Harry's perfunctory domestic troubles, as well as the lack of a powerfully mysterious center, make this the most routine of Connelly's eight world-class thrillers.