Angel's Flight is a police procedural, starring an anti-hero who is so removed from accepting the rigors of process and moving smoothly through institutional rigors, his story borders on an "anti-procedural." It's a whodunit in which the "why" is as important as the "who."

A pre-dawn phone call from the Deputy Chief of Police catches Harry off guard, worrying about his missing wife, Eleanor. When the chief refuses to reveal the identities of the victims even though he is calling an off-duty team to work a case outside their territory, all Harry's senses go on red alert. When the chief later tells Harry, it's "a delicate situation," that's the understatement of the year.

Harry is told to gather his team to investigate a double murder occurring on Angels Flight, a short inclined railroad ascending Bunker Hill in the California Plaza area of downtown Los Angeles. Harry, Jerry Edgar and Kizman Rider are a team in the Hollywood Division, working homicides.

The murder victims are a Latino woman and a black man, Catalina Perez and Howard Elias. Howard Elias had been an attorney of heroic proportions within L.A.'s black community, poised for trial of a suit against the LAPD on behalf of a confessed murderer.

Within hours the department has established a task force to investigate the murders, establishing Harry as co-captain with his nemesis Detective Chastain from Internal Affairs. Within days, the FBI is also involved – how all these "chiefs" will control their subordinates provides grist for Connelly's mill.

In earlier novels, on his own home turf, Harry has worked on murders of lost souls – fighting a system which might prefer to forget the death of a homeless drunk rather than see it squander the time and resources of an overworked, undermanned police department. In Angels Flight, Harry moves downtown and become involved in an entirely different scenario, a high profile murder with unavoidable racial repercussions. Not surprisingly, the Rodney King case and its aftermath is referred to frequently, as the police hierarchy attempts to defuse the consequences of the public's assumption that one of L.A.'s finest might have done the deed.

Despite the strict moral code to which he adheres, Harry is very human. A sad aspect of Harry's life is his seemingly endless search for a female, constant companion. In Angels Flight, Harry's female of choice – his estranged wife, Eleanor – takes on a dreamlike quality, which eventually is more nightmare than dream. Eleanor is a former FBI agent and convicted felon, who sinks further and further into hopelessness as she fails to find a rewarding job while Harry is constantly in-demand. Harry's marital status remains unresolved, unlike the murder cases, but Connelly uses this broken relationship as a metaphor for much that drives the battered, shattered lives of policemen in such stressed, urban locales.

There are numerous scenes which are potentially disturbing but absolutely essential to the core of this book. Death scenes, ranging from the introductory murder scene on Angels Flight to Harry's discovery of a suicide victim, mingle with scenes involving a client of Mistress Regina, a dominatrix with an Internet presence.

Despite realistic, gruesome, gut-wrenching scenes, Michael Connelly's most recent book is a "must read." Connelly uses the most unpalatable, difficult-to-digest aspects of humanity and helps us understand why these people are human and why we are like them. Media frenzy, bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo, whitewashing techniques, these and more are no deterrent to a reader's total involvement. You will turn pages as fast as you can. Then, when you finish, you will be a bit wiser about the human condition.

If you have read earlier Harry Bosch novels, Angels Flight is a must-read now. If you have missed the earlier books, you might want to start with The Black Echo and The Black Ice, "keepers" available in paperback.

--Sue Klock