Is The Burning Room by Michael Connelly the best Harry Bosch novel?

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Welcome to Los Angeles, and be sure to pronounce that name correctly, the Spanish way more and more people do in the increasingly diverse Southland of California. In Harry Bosch’s world, as in reality today, perps, victims, and cops alike are increasingly likely to be Latino.

Joining Detective Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch, presently of the Open-Unsolved Unit of the LAPD, is a young new partner, Lucia (Lucy) Soto, a celebrated hero known as Lucky Lucy. She had survived a shootout as a rookie and killed two bad guys in the process. The chief himself taps Harry and Lucy for the high-profile case of a mariachi musician who has just died of a gunshot wound suffered ten years earlier. They take off running, get a couple of breaks, and the nonstop action proceeds at a blistering pace.

Here is vintage Bosch, grumpily independent, disdainful of authority, and capable of great feats of logic and intuition, but Lucky Lucy keeps him on his toes, with little time for the brooding that characterizes so many of the other books about the veteran detective. But one theme is unchanged: Harry’s troubled relationship with his bosses. This is not a guy you’d want working for you!


The Burning Room (Harry Bosch #17 of 24) by Michael Connelly (2014) 400 pages ★★★★★


About the author

By my count, The Burning Room is the seventeenth novel in Michael Connelly‘s celebrated series of police procedurals featuring Harry Bosch. It may also be the best Harry Bosch novel. The Burning Room is unusually fast-paced and eventful, with two plot-lines twisting and turning simultaneously and keeping Harry and Lucy constantly short on sleep and on the run. Connelly has been winning awards for his writing ever since the publication of his first Harry Bosch novel, The Black Echo, in 1992.

Connelly’s adaptation of the Harry Bosch series has been running on Amazon Prime for three seasons. The fourth is currently being aired.

This book is one of the Great mysteries about Hollywood.

Also, you’ll find this and dozens of other excellent novels at 5 top Los Angeles mysteries and thrillers.

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More recently, Connelly began work on what appears to be a new series. See Michael Connelly introduces a tough new lead character in “The Late Show”.

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