Onyx reviews: Desert Star by Michael Connelly

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 12/29/2022

Renée Ballard and retired detective Harry Bosch have history with each other. Although they have occasionally collaborated on investigations, they've also been at loggerheads. When Desert Star opens, Bosch wants nothing to do with Ballard because she suddenly decided against opening a private detective agency with him when offered a golden ticket to return to LAPD. The long-abandoned cold case division, known as OU or Open/Unsolved, has been reborn thanks to a city councilman who wants to reopen the investigation into his 16-year-old sister's murder, a crime that was eclipsed by the Nicole Simpson murder and subsequent media circus a week later.

Ballard gets to head the unit, the only sworn officer on the team—all the rest are unpaid volunteers. Although she can pick the people who will join OU, for the most part, the city councilman has some say in the matter, too. Ballard fights to get Bosch approved (he hasn't many friends in LAPD, an agency he once successfully sued), and then has to fight with Bosch himself to get him to agree to come out of retirement. She offers him a carrot—the chance to reopen one of his "white whale" cases, the 2013 murder of a family of four that remains unresolved. Bosch has always had a pretty good idea who committed the murders, but he was never able to gather enough evidence to prosecute and his prime suspect has been off the radar for almost a decade.

However, to keep the unit running and funded, they have to show results, and fast. With the councilman regularly asking for updates on his sister's case, the unit's main focus has to be on her.

Ballard and Bosch don't always get along, in large part because they are similar in some ways. Both have little fondness for authority and even less for politics, and both tend to play fast and loose with the rules. However, Ballard is team leader and she has to keep Bosch and the others—including a civilian genetics/genealogy expert who unexpectedly discloses some latent "psychic" abilities—reined in. The unit is a second (or third) chance for her in LAPD and she doesn't want anyone to mess it up. She has to worry about things like chain-of-custody and the proper language for search warrants, whereas Bosch tends to shoot first and ask questions later, if at all.

Bosch's experience and outside-the-box approach to cold cases quickly pays dividends. Forensics have advanced significantly in the past two decades and one of his ideas allows techs to extract DNA from evidence that's been in a storage locker since 1994. While the genetic genealogy approach could turn up distant family members of the killer that a skillful genealogist could combine with social media to create a pool of suspects, the first major break in the case comes when the DNA proves to be a match to a suspect in another case. Unfortunately, that case is also unsolved. Still, it gives the team a new avenue to investigate.

Although Bosch's focus has to be on the case of the councilman's sister, he refuses to take his eyes of the case that brought him out of retirement. He's not getting any younger and his health is in decline, so he's highly aware of how little time he has left to try to get justice for the murdered family. Justice and closure are hard terms to define, though, and Bosch's solution to the case is ultimately only possible because he no longer wears a badge.

Connelly does an excellent job of leading readers—and investigators—down the garden path. One character in particular seems like a prime candidate for the 1994 murder. Everything fits...until it doesn't, and the team has to regroup and find another suspect.

By the end, it appears that Bosch's days may be numbered (he's been aging in more or less real time), but he probably has another case or two in him, especially if he and Ballard can find a way to continue working together without throttling each other first.