‘Closers’ fast-moving, multilayered

Harry Bosch’s place has always been as an L.A. police detective, solving homicides and making the world a little better. Although he has flirted with retirement and working as a private detective, “The Closers” finds Harry back where he should be – with the cops.

It didn’t take much for the LAPD to lure Harry back to the force, though working with one of his former partners, Kizman Rider, was a bonus. Their first case together sounds routine: reopening the 17-year-old murder of a high school girl because of a DNA match to blood found on the murder gun.

But “The Closers” – Michael Connelly’s 11th outing with Harry, and 15th novel overall – evolves into a multilayered plot that insightfully examines race, politics and the aftermath of a crime.

The teenage girl was biracial, and the DNA is a match to an uneducated white supremacist. Harry wonders if the first detectives mishandled the case because the police department and Los Angeles were hotbeds of simmering racial strife. The case takes Harry and Kiz through a labyrinth of secrets of the LAPD and the city itself.

“The Closers” moves at such a breakneck speed that it’s easy to miss the subtlety with which Connelly constructs the story. Connelly doesn’t use gratuitous violence to drive a story – he relies on first-class storytelling.

He realistically shows Harry, who has a reputation as being a rogue cop, trying to readjust to the LAPD and the ways that it – and he – have changed since he left.

Connelly continues to reinvent his work by exploring new aspects of Harry. The author makes this complicated cop a believable hero with flaws, self-doubt and, above all, an unshakable moral compass that guides him.