2007 Audie Award Winner for Mystery

List $39.98

Written by Michael Connelly - Audio book performed by Len Cariou - Unabridged Fiction - 10 COMPACT DISCS - 10.5 hours

Publisher, Time Warner Audio Books (October 2006)

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In 1993, Marie Gesto disappeared after walking out of a supermarket in Hollywood. Fearing the worst, the case was elevated by LAPD commanders from the missing persons squad to the Homicide Division, where Harry Bosch was assigned the case. But the 22-year-old woman never turned up--dead or alive--and it was a case Bosch couldn't crack.

Thirteen years later Bosch is in the Open-Unsolved Unit when he gets a call from the DA's office. A man accused of two heinous killings is willing to come clean in regard to several other murders in a deal to avoid the death penalty. One of those murders, he says, is the killing of Marie Gesto. Bosch is now assigned to take Raynard Waits' confession and to make sure the killer is not scamming authorities to avoid a date with death.

In confirming the confession Bosch must get close to the man he has sought for thirteen years. Bosch's whole being as a cop begins to crack when he comes to realize that he and his partner missed a clue back in 1993 that could have led them to Waits and would have stopped the nine murders that followed the killing of Marie Gesto.

About the Author: Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.

After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986 he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors that was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.

After three years on the crime beat, Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published in 1992 and later won the Edgar Award for best first novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Connelly followed up with three more Bosch books before publishing The Poet, a thriller with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist, in 1996. In 1997 he went back to Bosch with Trunk Music and in 1998 another non-series thriller, Blood Work, was published. Blood Work was inspired in part by a friends receiving of a heart transplant and the attendant survivors guilt the friend experienced, knowing that someone died in order that he have the chance to live. Connelly had been interested and fascinated by those same feelings as expressed by the survivors of the plane crash he wrote about years before. With his friend acting as both technical and emotional advisor, Connelly wrote the book about a former FBI agent with a heart transplant who gets caught up in a web of murder. Connelly's' books have won the Edgar, Anthony, Nero, Maltese Falcon (Japan) and .38 caliber (France) awards. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter.

About the Performer: Len Cariou is a distinguished stage, television, and film actor. A three-time Tony Award Nominee, he won for his legendary performance as SWEENEY TODD. His film credits include FOUR SEASONS, EXECUTIVE DECISION, ABOUT SCHMIDT, SHALL WE DANCE, SECRET WINDOW and THE UNTITLED ONION MOVIE. He appeared in the TV mini-series NUREMBERG, and on the series THE WEST WING, THE PRACTICE, and LAW AND ORDER, among many others. Recent Broadway appearances include THE DINNER PARTY and PROOF. His narration of The Jonestown Flood helped that documentary win an Academy Award. He read CITY OF BONES and LOST LIGHT for Time Warner Audiobooks.