Desert Star

Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch reunite to run the LAPD's newly reconstituted cold case unit. Ballard's priority case is the decades-old rape and murder of a teenage girl whose brother, a city councilman, pushed to reopen the unit — a cold hit ties it to a wider pattern of the same killer. Bosch, in exchange for department resources, gets to pursue his own long-standing obsession: the unsolved murder of a family that has stayed with him for years.

Working two investigations and an uneasy partnership at once, both detectives are pulled between what the badge allows and what the case demands. Desert Star is the fifth Renée Ballard novel and the twenty-fourth in the wider Harry Bosch sequence, a patient procedural about the cases that don't let a detective go.