What we have instead is an OK effort that holds the reader to its melodramatic end and that, in the process, all but guarantees the return of Connelly's protagonist, the squirrelly Harry Bosch, to the Los Angeles Police Department in future efforts. (The obsessive Bosch has been retired from the force for a couple of years and - surprise - hasn't a clue what to do with his life.)
The nits to pick here are fairly small, and it remains a pleasure to start a new Connelly offering, which routinely makes you forget to brush your teeth before bed. But it's time for him to unload something outrageously good again.
The book opens in fine fashion with an unassailable fact. "I think maybe I only know one thing in this world,'' Bosch says. "One thing for sure. And that is that the truth does not set you free.''
Spoken like a cop. The title, by the way, refers figuratively to life's dark recesses and literally to the part of the Los Angeles River that shrinks to a dangerous gauge. The story begins - and I'm not giving away secrets here - with the suspicion by the widow of Terry McCaleb, a retired FBI profiler of serial killers in earlier books, that her husband had been murdered, not stricken by a heart attack, on his charter fishing boat with a client aboard, as had been assumed. (Eastwood played the McCaleb character in the so-so "Blood Work'' film.)
She approaches Bosch, who had worked cases with McCaleb, to look into the case. He does.
Separately, we learn that Robert Backus is alive. Backus was the veteran FBI agent who turned out to be a serial killer in "The Poet,'' one of Connelly's best books. Thought shot dead by FBI agent Rachel Walling, Backus returns in "The Narrows'' to haunt Walling and emerges as the prime suspect in McCaleb's murder. Bosch follows his tracks, locking horns with the FBI and growing close to Walling in the process. You're on your own for the rest of it.
