City of Bones was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2002, the eighth Harry Bosch novel and one of the finest in the series. A doctor’s dog brings home a human bone from the hillside above his Laurel Canyon home. Bosch responds to the call and discovers the skeleton of a child — buried roughly twenty years, showing evidence of extensive physical abuse (healed fractures, growth stunting) that predated the murder.
The investigation into a twenty-year-old cold case takes Bosch through the bureaucratic failures that allowed the abuse: a school that didn’t report injuries, a neighbor who looked away, a system designed to protect children that instead abandoned one. The dead boy’s identity, when established, reveals a life of such sustained cruelty that Bosch’s response — rage channeled into investigative precision — becomes the novel’s emotional engine.
Connelly uses the cold case to explore Bosch’s relationship with his own childhood (he grew up in foster homes and juvenile facilities after his mother’s murder) and the question of whether personal damage makes a detective better (more motivated, more empathetic) or worse (more obsessive, more willing to cross lines). The novel’s title refers to Los Angeles itself — a city built on buried bones, whose glamorous surface conceals layers of forgotten violence.
The case also threatens Bosch’s career: pressure from above to close it quietly, questions about his methods, and the fundamental problem of prosecuting someone for a crime committed two decades ago when witnesses have died, memories have degraded, and evidence has deteriorated.
Collecting City of Bones
First edition (Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2002): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- Signed first edition: $30–$70
- Without jacket: $5–$10