Given three years before he must retire from the LAPD, Detective Harry Bosch wants cases more fiercely than ever - and in one morning he gets two. DNA from the 1989 murder matches that of a twenty-nine-year-old convicted rapist. Was he an eight-year-old killer, or has something gone terribly wrong in the Regional Crime Lab? When a city councilman's son jumps - or is dropped - from a window at the Charteau Marmont, Bosch is called to a death scene fraught with internal politics. Bosch's old nemesis, the councilman demands that Bosch handle the investigation. Now relentlessly pursuing both cases, Bosch makes two chilling discoveries, a sadistic killer has been operating unknown in the city for more than two decades - and a political conspiracy threatens to reveal the dark history of the police department itself.