This is the 19th installment in the long running Hieronymus Bosch series. I doubt that there is a reader who hasn't heard of Bosch, and, with the extremely successful Amazon television adaptation, there are few non-readers who haven't heard of him.

This might be my favorite mystery series of all time - the only other possible competitor is Hercule Poirot, and those two series couldn't be more different. Connelly consistently delivers solid mystery plots, and his use of the L.A. setting makes him the direct heir to Raymond Chandler, Dashielle Hammett and the other noir writers of the thirties and forties who set their books in a long-gone version of Los Angeles.

Even among the consistently good Bosch books, I thought that this one was a total winner. There are two investigations & both are well done and entertaining. Bosch has left the LAPD and is figuring out who he is when he isn't a member of one of the top police forces in the world. Connelly has given Bosch two new partners in the last couple of books, both of them smart, interesting, capable young women, which is a terrific development in the series, although I don't think either of them are going to stick around. Maddie is off to college, and Bosch is not romantically involved. Personally, I prefer not reading about his ill-fated romantic entanglements, so the less Connelly deals with those, the better for me.

Anyway, I'm in the short haul to catching up with the series, with only 3 books left, along with the first of the Renee Ballard books, The Late Show, which will be my next book. after that, the next book, Two Kinds of Truth, was adapted for the television series last season, so I'm familiar with the storyline. After that, the series enters into a new era, with the addition of Renee Ballard as an erstwhile "partner" to Bosch. The first of the Ballard & Bosch books, Dark Sacred Night, is the story for the season that will drop 4/17/2020, which is why I'm trying so hard to catch up!