Finished Th 6/28/18
I got this paperback at the last library book sale earlier this month.
'The Poet' (Robert Backus) is back! He was a supervisor in the Behavioral Analysis Unit, and mentor to agent Rachel Walling, and partner to Terry McCaleb.
Graciela McCaleb contacts Harry Bosch, now a private investigator, and she wants him to investigates the details of her husband's death. His transplanted heart did not give out, but his medicine was switched for a placebo... In the end of the book it's revealed that Terry's death didn't have anything to do with a switch of medicine. His transplanted heart was rejected by his body. He didn't act on this knowing that his family would get the insurance.
Terry was running a fishing boat off Catalina Island, but also doing profile work for whatever agency that would hire him. He was also chasing down leads on Backus as well. Terry suspects that one of his fishing clients was Backus. He was right.
While this is going on, Rachel Walling is being used by the FBI as bait to catch The Poet. She has been sent to a 'nowhere' field office in North Dakota when the bureau learns that a series of killings in the Los Angeles/ Nevada area are probably murders by Backus. The bodies were found along Zzyzx, California. Rachel is mentioned by name by one of Backus's clues.
Rachel and Harry team up and chase the clues that Backus has deviously left. Clear, Nevada is a 'brothel town' where Backus was collecting his victims. Harry figures this out by using 'The Triangle Method'-1. Where the perp begins; 2. Where the victims are killed; 3. Where the victims are buried. This pattern is always repeated.
Backus hoped to fake his own death and also kill Rachel in an explosion/ fire that he set in a trailer near Clear, NV. When Harry and Rachel approaches the unit, Harry realizes that a bomb has been set, and they barely get out. But, Harry grabs a picture (of Backus's last kill- bookstore owner in front of the house that The Poet has lured him to) and Rachel grabs a hat that was staged on a body in the trailer. This body was supposed to have been destroyed in the explosion and it would appear that this would be The Poet's final crime. It wasn't.
Maddie, Harry's daughter, is five years old and lives with Eleanor in Las Vegas. Eleanor is a professional poker player sponsored by the big hotels and casinos along the Strip.
I loved the book and would read anything by Connelly. I recently heard an excellent podcast where he was interviewed by Sam Jones. Connelly has lead a very interesting life, and he is most certainly The Real Deal.
From Wikipedia-
"While investigating the death of ex-FBI profiler Terry McCaleb at his wife's request, Bosch begins to suspect that notorious serial killer and ex-FBI supervisor Robert Backus, aka The Poet, presumed dead, may have murdered McCaleb. Digging deeper, Bosch follows a lead to Las Vegas that brings him into contact with the FBI. Meanwhile, FBI agent Rachel Walling, who was at one time Backus's protégé in the FBI (as McCaleb had also been) and who has been exiled by the FBI to South Dakota for four years for her role in The Poet investigation, is the subject of messages sent by Backus to the FBI. As Bosch and Walling are both outsiders to the main FBI investigation, they eventually join forces. The novel shifts points of view, cutting from Bosch's first-person commentary to the third-person perspectives of Walling and Backus. Bosch meets a neighbor whom he later discovers (in the book The Closers) to be Cassie Black, the main character of Void Moon, and he begins a relationship with Walling. He also accepts an offer from his old partner Kiz Rider to rejoin the LAPD under a new chief of police, as a homicide detective in the Open-Unsolved Unit within the department's Robbery-Homicide Division.
In the end, Bosch and Walling bring The Poet to justice by chasing him into the concrete channels of the swollen Los Angeles River in L.A., where he drowns while Bosch barely survives. His death is confirmed this time, as opposed to The Poet where he was merely presumed dead. However, the relationship between Bosch and Walling falls apart in the end when Bosch learns that the FBI had discovered that Backus had nothing to do with McCaleb's death but had withheld the information from him. In fact, McCaleb had killed himself in a manner to make his death look accidental, as his heart transplant was failing, and he did not want to burden his wife and children with the crippling expense of additional medical procedures."
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