Case crackers

Closure is about bringing something to an end. Michael Connelly’s “The Closers” is about completions that are hard-won too.

In Los Angeles in 1988, a 16-year-old girl, Rebecca Verloren, disappears from her bedroom in her parents’ home, and her body is found on a nearby hillside two days later. Suicide? Murder? A kidnapping gone wrong? After a fruitless investigation, police shelve the case as unsolved, leaving its aftershocks to scar or shatter several lives. Violence always does that. Violence unpunished, unexplained, does so even more.

In 2004, three years after his retirement from the LAPD, Harry Bosch is back on the force, assigned to work with his old partner, Kizmin Rider. He faces a renovated police department, a new chief and a new assignment. What was once the Cold Case Squad has been given a new, improved name -- the Open Unsolved unit. The first case Bosch and Rider must solve and close is that of Verloren. New evidence has just surfaced, DNA evidence that was not available 16 years before, but some of the old evidence has disappeared. Now, Bosch and Rider have to follow a cold trail or no trail at all.

They need to solve a puzzle, uncover secrets blurred by past errors, concealed by time elapsed, hushed by fellow police covering guilty tracks. It isn’t enough for them to winkle out evidentiary clues that, properly arranged, will lead to a solution and, hopefully, a resolution. They have to knock on doors, harvest details, squeeze out information and collate it. All this must be done in a context of crime scenes erased, witnesses vanished, memories dimmed and dirty work committed at Parker Center, where, as in 1988, police officers are seeking to cover their own and each others’ posteriors.

Fans of Connelly will recognize the deliberate progression of Police Procedural 101, in which he excels; also the thick acronym soup of cop-speak. They will welcome back Bosch on full alert and with tricks aplenty, most of them legal. Bosch has taken to driving an SUV -- and a black Mercedes SUV at that. But he is as laconic and as decent as ever -- solitary, sentimental, sensitive, slow, stout-hearted. He’s an idiosyncratic man of few words who never gives up scratching for evidence.

Much of the scratching is done in and around Chatsworth, at the northwestern corner of our metropolitan sprawl, where the Verlorens lived and where their daughter went to school and where Harry’s prime suspect still resides. But, like Raymond Chandler, Connelly is a keen observer of our City of (fallen) Angels and of the San Fernando Valley in particular, where he once worked as a crime reporter. Unsurprisingly, then, the investigation, like most L.A. activities, meanders all over, through the Valley and Hollywood, downtown to City Hall and to Union Station: The story becomes a gazetteer of our city streets.

In Connelly’s thrillers, thrills are relatively rare, but suspense is constant, and surprises bedevil our cops. The Verloren family is biracial: Could the girl’s murder have been a race crime? Or could it have been precipitated by some secret affair? How much do answers to such questions matter when Connelly has written a requiem for all who die unavenged?

In the end, the key to “The Closers” lies in Chatsworth: not in political but in personal orientations, problems and miscalculations (as one might expect but would not have guessed). After 16 years and more than 400 pages, the innocent dead are revenged, and the walking wounded lurch on. So do Bosch and Kiz Rider, disenchanted but not dispassionate, hard-boiled but soft-centered, always reliably professional. Like their creator. *