The case started in 1992, a few days after the acquittal of the cops who beat up Rodney King incited an eruption of violence in Los Angeles. In the heart of the violence, in a South-Central alley, Danish photojournalist, Anneke Jespersen, was shot dead. Bosch and his partner, Jerry Edgar, briefly examine the body, but there’s not enough time to pursue the case with all that is happening. The only clue that Bosch finds is a single 9mm brass shell casing.
Twenty years later, while working cold cases in the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit, Harry Bosch links the bullet from a recent crime to the crime in the white reporter’s file from 1992. The patient had gone cold since Harry first was involved and was then handed off to the Riot Crimes Task Force and never solved. Matching the shell casing to both crimes suggested that the reporter’s death may have been more than random violence.
Bosch begins to search for the one piece of evidence that might pull the case together and refers to it as the “black box, “ which will explain everything. Forensic technology connects the shell casing to a gun used in the Iraq war. Still, departmental politics flare-up over white Bosch spending time finding the killer of a white reporter from the South LA riots where so many blacks were killed.
Bosch won’t stop his search until he solves the crime. The twists and turns from finding a single shell casing in the beginning to the conclusion of this story are fascinating.
Quotes From: The Black Box
“keep your quid pro quota shit. I only told you about Story because he’s dead. You can put me back in.”
“The best and fastest way to break a conspiracy was to identify the weakest link in the chain and find a way to exploit it. When one link was broken, the chain would come loose.”
“It was no longer an unexplained blip on his radar. There was now something solid there that needed to be explained and understood.
