Lost Light is the ninth book in Michael Connelly’s series about Los Angeles Homicide Detective, Harry Bosch. At this juncture, Harry has retired from LAPD and had been having trouble settling down in retirement. As most cops do, he acquired a private detective license once he turned in his badge, but he hasn’t really done anything with it just yet.

This changes when Harry receives a call from a fellow officer, Lawton Cross, calls him and asks if he remembers the Angella Benton case. Three years before, Harry was assigned the case of her murder. She had been working as a production assistant for a movie producer when her body was found in the vestibule of her apartment building in what appeared to be a sexual crime. The day Harry was on the movie set interviewing her coworkers, there was a robbery of $2 million. In the name of realism, the director wanted to use real money. Despite security precautions, the cash was stolen in an armed robbery that killed two other people on the set. Harry was able to get off a few shots and struck one of the robbers, but he never turned up anywhere. The case was then reassigned to robbery-homicide where Lawton Cross and his partner took over.

A few months later, the two detectives working the case were involved in a robbery-homicide at a local watering hole. Lawton survived the attack while his partner was killed, but a bullet left Lawton a parapalegic. In order to get Harry to visit and bring him some booze, Lawton begins feeding Harry information about the case, stringing him along.

Harry knowingly takes the bait. He’s sympathetic to Lawton’s predicament but also interested in solving a murder that was taken away from him, where the victim seemed to be beseeching him to attain justice for her. During the course of the investigation, Harry runs afoul of the FBI, specifically one of their “special” squads that have risen up following 9/11. It turns out that one of the bills from the movie set turned up in cash being carried by a terrorist across the Mexican border, and the FBI is trying to figure out of the robbery of that much cash was in an attempt to finance ongoing terrorist activity.

This was actually my second read of Lost Light. I’d read it a number of years before, and I could remember some parts of the story. Harry reconnects with his ex-wife, former FBI agent Eleanor Wish, who now lives in Las Vegas and is a professional card player. I remembered how that part of the story was going to end, so there were no surprises there. I couldn’t remmeber all of the details of the murder case, though. Once I’d reached a certain point in the book, something clicked and I knew how it was going to end, but until that point, I was guessing along with anyone reading it for the first time. There are lots of red herrings that Harry investigates, much the same way detectives in real life often chase down leads that end up as dead ends. The suspense was great and kept me wondering if I was on the right track or not (usually not).

The audiobook is narrated by Len Cariou. For the most part, he does a good job. His voice fits in with the character Titus Welliver has brought to the screen. I could picture him as I listened to the book. However, there are moments when Cariou tries to portray the character of a reporter, Keisha Williams, as having a Jamaican accent. He fails miserably. The voice he gives her sounds more Irish than Jamaican and was a bit ditracting whenever she came into a scene. I would have preferred if he had just used a regular voice for her, rather than attempting that accent.

There’s not much action in Lost Light until the very end. It’s more of a psychological build-up than action-oriented. Harry manages to navigate the minefields placed in front of him by the FBI who wants to keep the case under wraps. Harry digging into it is inconvenient for them, who are operating even more secretly since 9/11. Without a badge, Harry makes an easy target as they try to dissuade him from any more investigating. That only makes him dig in more, in true Harry Bosch fashion.

This series is a good one. Harry is at a bit of a crossroads here, and if you don’t know where he’s going at this point it’s a nice twist to throw into his personal life. He seems to be thinking towards one particular eventuality that involved reuniting with his ex-wife, but there are complications. It’s interesting to see how that goes, and Connelly leaves open some great possibilities for the future adventures of Harry Bosch.