THE WRONG SIDE OF GOODBYE by Michael Connelly

Finished Tu 6/18/19

A Harry Bosch Novel

I got this trade paperback at the library book sale on Fr 6/7/19

Released in 2016 and Harry has left the LA police department and now is semi-retired and works part time for the San Fernando Police and takes private cases. It seems that he works the SFPD mainly so that he can use their printers and computers for his private work. "Harry has been taken on as a volunteer reserve officer by the San Fernando Police Department to investigate cold cases."

The novel is really two separate cases:
1) The Screen Cutter Rapist (San Fernando Case)

2) The Search For Whitney Lance's Heir (Harry's Private Case)

Screen Cutter wears a mask, but leaves DNA
Has prior knowledge of the women, and maybe has had face to face contact
Selects women who are ovulating

The perpetrator is Detective Dockweiler an ex-officer of the San Fernando Police Department. He was demoted to Public Works as a cost cutting measure. He was forever resentful. He tracked his victims while checking properties for illegal electrical hookups.

He kidnaps a female detective, Bella, of the SFPD and Harry finds her in a hidden bunker under Dockweiler's house.


The private case concerns a billionaire, Whitney Lance. He's an 85 year old man who is looking for an heir. He believes that he impregnated a Mexican woman in 1950 and he wants to find out about this individual. "Now well into his 80s, Whitney Lance had left behind a pregnant underage Mexican girl “on the wrong side of goodbye” when he was a college student."

Harry learns that Lance had a son, and this young man was killed in the Vietnam War. The billionaire's company that made the helicopter that the boy died in was owned by the Lances.

Harry was a 'tunnel rat' during the Vietnam War. With a knife, he would crawl through the Vietcong tunnels and clear them of enemy fighters. Harry tells Maddie, his daughter, that the reason he will not eat Vietnamese food is that during his tour of duty he had to eat that food every day. He says that if he ate western food, the enemy would smell him in the tunnels.

Although Whitney's son has died, Harry finds out that this boy had a lover and she had a daughter.  The daughter and mother are local LA artists on the Latino Scene.

A sub-plot is that Whitney's elderly secretary writes a phony will in which she rewards herself with ten million dollars of the billions in the inheritance.  And, in order to keep this secret, she smothered the old man and made it look like he died at his desk.

All of the Bosch series are excellent and I want to make sure I've read them all.