THE CROSSING

Harry Bosch goes to work for the Lincoln lawyer.

There’s no reason why brothers can’t work together, even if they’re only half brothers—unless one of them put in nearly 30 years at LAPD Robbery-Homicide before a suspension that led to retirement and the other works night and day to get crime suspects released. And defense attorney Mickey Haller can really use his half brother’s help finding evidence that will back up his longtime client Da’Quan "DQ" Foster’s claim that he didn’t assault West Hollywood assistant city manager Lexi Parks in her home and beat her to death, because Bosch’s former colleagues have damning DNA evidence DQ can’t explain that links him directly to the victim, and a hit-and-run accident has sidelined Dennis “Cisco” Wojciechowski, Haller’s regular investigator. Bosch (The Burning Room, 2014, etc.) has a million reasons not to cross over “to the other side of the aisle,” but step by step, fearful that the real killer is still out there, he finds himself drawn into the case despite his reservations. The news that his alibi witness was murdered shortly after DQ was arrested both deepens his plight and makes his story more plausible, for Bosch if not for the cops, and he spends some time examining a couple of unhelpfully clean-swept crime scenes before he gets a hunch that the key to the case is a pricey Audemars Piguet watch that Lexi Parks sent off to be repaired and never picked up—and that the killer he’s looking for is actually a pair of killers. The deeper he digs, the more reasons he finds to regret having crossed to Haller’s dark side and the more reasons to be skeptical, even fearful, of the LAPD.

Solid, unspectacular, utterly engrossing work from the reigning master of the police procedural.