City of dreams? Well, that’s just Bosch

“The NARROWS,” Michael Connelly’s 14th novel, winds its mesmerizing way from San Pedro to the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas and, finally, to a dark and very damp Los Angeles. There, its hero, Harry Bosch, struggles against man and nature in an attempt to bring closure to the one case his author left unresolved. That would be “The Poet,” a 1996 novel that ended with the title character, a demonic serial killer with an unhealthy fondness for the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, wounded and staggering off into the darkness, possibly to die, more likely to live to slay again.

It is worth noting that the Poet’s escape did not take place on Harry’s watch. That book, which elevated the author to the top of the bestseller lists, featured as protagonists Denver crime reporter Jack McEvoy and FBI agent Rachel Walling. Its less-than-tidy conclusion, which Connelly has said was in response to the vagaries of justice in the real world, underscored a major change in detective fiction. In the stories by Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, and the even more influential writings of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the investigator went on a quest for truth that would in turn bring order to the societal chaos caused by crime. Today’s rather gloomy, hard-edged sleuths, of which Bosch may be the prime example, have given up the hope of establishing order in this imperfect world. And truth has become something less than a cherished prize.

“I think maybe I know one thing in this world,” Bosch tells us early in his new narrative. “One thing for sure. And that is that the truth does not set you free.... The truths I have learned hold me down like chains in a dark room, an underworld of ghosts and victims that slither around me like snakes. It is the place where the truth is not something to look at or behold. It is the place where evil waits....

“I knew this going in on the day I took the case that would lead me into the narrows. I knew that my life’s mission would always take me to the places where evil waits.... And still I went without pause.”

The case that lures Bosch toward the narrows (a section of the Los Angeles River that becomes particularly treacherous during the rainy season) involves the death of former FBI profiler Terry McCaleb, who first appeared as the protagonist of the author’s 1997 thriller “Blood Work,” and who, four years later, shared center stage with Bosch in the novel “A Darkness More Than Night.”

Since McCaleb had been living on borrowed time and a transplanted heart, his passing was attributed to natural causes. But Bosch, hired by the dead man’s suspicious widow, finds enough clues and connections to make his journey to the narrows inevitable.

Less predictable is the intriguing world Connelly has created for his hero, a mirror image of the West Coast that exists somewhere north of fiction and south of fact, where the Poet may be mentioned in the same breath with Robert Blake and Laci Peterson; where, as in real life, Clint Eastwood has brought McCaleb’s story to the screen (in the movie version of “Blood Work,” much to the annoyance of the fictional dead man’s widow and his close friend, who express dismay over their film portrayals); and where a book titled “The Poet” once topped bestseller lists. That particular version of the case was penned by fictional Rocky Mountain News crime reporter McEvoy, but there is an almost giddy self-deprecation inherent in Connelly having a “Narrows” character comment, “I guarantee he’ll be back for the sequel.”

In point of fact, it’s hard to think of “The Narrows” as being a sequel to “The Poet” or as anything else but a Harry Bosch novel. It does bring us up to date on characters from that earlier work, chief among them the villain and his pursuer, agent Walling. But we also have characters from “Blood Work” and, in a surprising cameo appearance, Cassie Black, the casino thief heroine of “Void Moon.” What Connelly seems to be telling us is that, while Bosch did not participate in any of those novels, they were definitely a part of his world.

This confluence of characters from the Connelly canon may cause the cynics among us to start mumbling that Disneyland mantra about its being a small world after all. But it will reaffirm the belief of Bosch’s ever-increasing fan base that the complex hero stands at the epicenter of the well-thought-out, disturbingly moody universe the author has created.

In the riveting, suspenseful sections of “The Narrows,” Bosch and Walling try to silence the Poet before he can increase his already impressive victim count by adding bookseller Ed Thomas to the list (a particularly grim possibility because the real Thomas’ Book Carnival in Orange is one of the better stores in Southern California to find mystery novels as intriguing as this one). Their edgy alliance is the kind of thing most thrillers rely on, but Connelly is too shrewd to bother with sexual politics or witty banter that goes nowhere. Better to keep the dialogue brittle and authentic (one gets the impression that the author must spend an inordinate amount of time with an ear out in squad rooms and bureau venues), the action on point and the pace relentless.

After all, hunting a serial killer is just one of the current tasks on Bosch’s table. His relationship with his ex-wife is in dire need of salvage. He has to come up with a plan that will persuade her that the new “Sin Is Back In” Las Vegas is not the proper environment in which to raise their 5-year-old daughter.

And there’s the matter of his future employment.

Two books back, Bosch took early retirement from the LAPD, fed up with its boneheaded bureaucracy. In the middle of his search for the Poet, he discovers that the new chief of police has not only raised the morale of the department, he has opened the door for former officers to return. If they do so within three years of retirement, there will be no need for them to attend the academy again.

Bosch has a few months left to make up his mind. Will he exchange his PI license for a badge?

The answer seems fairly obvious when one views “Blue Neon Night: Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles,” the free DVD produced and directed by Terrill Lee Langford (author of the thriller “Earthquake Weather”) that will accompany “The Narrows” as long as supplies last. As the entertaining 50-minute documentary draws to a close, we see LAPD Chief William J. Bratton inform a Police Academy graduation class that the burly, bearded, bespectacled gent sharing the dais with him is the award-winning novelist Michael Connelly, whose hero Harry Bosch was “like over 900 Los Angeles police officers, who were so frustrated with conditions within the department that they left. I am trying to encourage Mr. Bosch -- excuse me, Mr. Connelly -- to encourage Det. Bosch to return to the department in his next novel as a sign of faith in the reorganization of the organization.”

The author makes no promises. He sits there with a curious smile on his face, as if enjoying this new and rather remarkable bit of evidence that the real world and Bosch’s world have become indistinguishable enough to impress even Pirandello. *