The Hollow

Book 0: A Harry Bosch Novel

by Michael Connelly

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

Retired LAPD detective Harry Bosch delves into the darkest chapter of his past in the new thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly.

When Harry Bosch was eleven years old, his mother was murdered and he became a ward of the state, housed in MacLaren Children’s Center, a notorious facility where abuse was rampant. Decades after its closure, a massive class action lawsuit has resulted in a multibillion-dollar settlement for former residents. But when Bosch’s half-brother, defense attorney Mickey Haller, brings him word that Harry is entitled to $400,000, Bosch says he doesn’t want the money. He wants justice.

News of the settlement awakens his memories of a place he had hoped never to revisit, and a boy named Chops, a fellow inmate who wound up dead. Chops’s body was found in a hidden space under a staircase that the staff used to discipline their charges. The kids knew it only as “the hollow.” But Chops’s death was covered up and never solved. Now Bosch knows he must reopen the investigation and learn the truth, even if the killer is long dead.

As Bosch digs into the files, he picks up the trail of a predator who not only survived, but went on to a life of vicious crime. Forced to face a history that both scarred him and launched him on his mission as a cop, Bosch must bring down a sadistic criminal and finally put to rest the demons of his past.

Release date: November 3, 2026

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 400

Sample

BOSCH WALKED BETWEEN the headstones, checking names as he passed. These days he suspected that he knew more people belowground than above. He moved slowly, using the cane for support.

He saw Talbot up ahead, standing at the foot of his first wife’s grave. It had been a while since Bosch had seen him. He had less hair and a thicker waist. As expected, he wasn’t happy to see Bosch approaching with his vase of fresh tulips.

“What the fuck are you doing here, Bosch?” Talbot said.

“I could ask you the same thing, Talbot,” Bosch said.

“She’s my wife.”

“Was your wife.”

“Fuck you. Do you even still have a badge?”

“Lucky for guys like you, I hung it up a long time ago.”

“Then what the fuck? You bringing my wife flowers? You got a thing for dead women, Bosch?”

“Twenty-fifth anniversary. I didn’t expect anyone else to be here. Least of all the guy who put her in the grave.”

“Fuck off, Bosch. You’re a loser. And guess what — I come every year.”

“To gloat.”

“To mourn.”

“I’m sure she appreciates it.”

Sarcasm delivered, Bosch looked down at the grave. The marker was simple and inexpensive.

TALBOT

1962–2001

Her husband hadn’t even put her first name on the stone.

“It’s under your skin, isn’t it?” Talbot said. “All these years… the case you couldn’t solve.”

“Nobody bats a thousand in homicide work, Talbot,” Bosch said. “But this one I did solve. I just didn’t make the arrest. There’s a difference.”

The two men held each other’s eyes in a serious stare-down. Talbot looked away first. The guilty man always does.

There was something different about him but Bosch couldn’t place it. It wasn’t the hair or the potbelly.

“You know, this is harassment,” Talbot said. “You and your baseless accusations. I had nothing to do with it, so why don’t you just get the fuck out of here and leave me alone.”

“Yeah. I’ll go. I’ll just leave the flowers. I remember the tulips in the house that day. Never figured out where they came from.”

Bosch bent over and put the vase down in the grass in front of the granite stone. He adjusted the angle so it offered the best display of the yellow and red flowers. When he straightened up, he was hit with a jolt of vertigo. He leaned heavily on the cane till it passed.

“You okay, old man?” Talbot asked. “That would be something, huh? You dying in a graveyard.”

“Yeah, something,” Bosch said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

It was the absence of glasses. Talbot used to wear eyeglasses. He must’ve gotten contacts or had his vision surgically corrected.

“That’s right,” Talbot said. “Take your cane and your slow ass back to the old folks’ home.”

“Catch you later,” Bosch said.

Bosch made his way back to his car, which was parked on one of the cemetery’s narrow access roads. He thought about how, twenty-five years before, he’d come within minutes of getting a confession out of Talbot. His estranged wife, Jennifer, had been found beaten to death in the apartment she had recently moved into. The scene was staged to look like an intruder had broken in and waited for her to come home from work. She had been sexually assaulted with an unknown, never recovered foreign object, but at autopsy it was determined that some of the assault had occurred postmortem. It was part of the staging. So were the tulips — left to help sell the misdirection that whoever delivered the flowers had seen the recipient as vulnerable and come back later to break in and commit the crime. All of that made Bosch focus on the husband, Gregory Talbot. In the interrogation room, Talbot waived his rights and agreed to talk. They went two hours in a cat-and-mouse interview, Bosch slowly closing in, using inconsistencies and a leaky alibi to back him into a corner. But then Talbot ended it by playing the lawyer card. Bosch left the room knowing the killer was Talbot but with nothing to charge him with.

By the time Bosch made it from the grave site to his car, his left leg was burning with pain. It was the longest he had walked and the longest he had stood since getting the knee replacement four weeks before. His recovery had been without incident but he had pushed it going to the cemetery to confront Talbot.

He took the bottle of Tylenol out of the glove box and downed two pills without water, first crunching them in his teeth so that they might hit his bloodstream sooner. The taste was acrid. He started the car and drove through the main gate of the cemetery to Santa Monica Boulevard.

BOSCH TURNED RIGHT onto Gower and pulled to the red curb behind a white van with READY ROOTER painted on its side. He got out of his car and walked up to the van. He rapped his knuckles on the side door, and it was opened by Renée Ballard.

“Anything?” Bosch asked.

“We’re getting some stuff,” Ballard said. “He’s talking to her and he doesn’t care much for you, Harry.”

“I noticed that.”

“Climb in.”

Bosch glanced down at what looked like an eighteen-inch step up from the curb. Ballard noticed his dilemma.

“Tom, help him in,” she said.

Tom Laffont took his headset off and rolled his chair to the van’s door. He reached a hand out to Bosch and managed to pull him in, with Harry putting minimal stress on his new knee.

“Take my seat,” Ballard said. “Ozzie, put it on speaker.”

Ozzie was John Osmond of the tech unit. Bosch remained standing. New knee or not, he didn’t like the idea of taking a seat from the woman in charge. The van had an extended top and he didn’t have to crouch.

Osmond flipped a switch on the monitoring equipment and a one-sided conversation came through the van’s speakers. Laffont slid the van’s door closed.

“No, you had to laugh. You had to make me feel small.”

It was Talbot talking to his dead wife. His murdered wife.

“Twenty-five years,” he said. “We could still be together. We could be happy. But you had to laugh when a man opened his heart to you.”

“There’s your motive,” Laffont said.

“Maybe,” Ballard said.

There was a prolonged silence and then Talbot’s visit to his wife’s grave was apparently over. The bug in the tulip vase picked up Talbot’s footsteps walking away in the grass.

“Oh, baby,” Laffont said. “We’re this close.” He held a thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

“What did I miss?” Bosch asked.

“He started with the usual blame-the-victim rant,” Ballard said. “The It was all your fault schtick.”

“But nothing specific?” Bosch pressed.

“Not really,” Ballard said.

Bosch shook his head. He knew it had been a long shot but he’d hoped that with his prodding and the tulips, Talbot would be goaded into lashing out verbally and solidly incriminating himself. Bosch had waited a year for this. The tip had come after the previous anniversary. A gravedigger had overheard Talbot yelling at his dead wife and gloating at getting away with murder. But that hadn’t been taped and the gravedigger was not a good witness, having a felony assault conviction on his record.

“We’ll play this for Paul, see what he thinks,” Ballard said.

Paul Masser, like Laffont, was one of Ballard’s volunteers on the cold-case unit, where she was the only full-time sworn LAPD officer. Masser was a former prosecutor who would give an opinion on whether they could file a case on Talbot based on what they had recorded.

“But I tell you what, Margaret Atwood sure got it right,” Ballard said.

“About what?” Bosch asked.

“She said men fear that women will laugh at them,” Ballard said, “and women fear that men will kill them.”

“That’s cheery,” Laffont said.

“But true,” Ballard said.

“Let me know what Paul thinks,” Bosch said. “I’m going home.”

Bosch was turning toward the van’s door when a rustling sound came from the speakers.

“Somebody picked up the vase,” Ballard said.

“Did Talbot come back?” Laffont asked.

Nobody answered. They could hear footsteps on the grass and fallen leaves, then footsteps on asphalt, followed by a car door opening.

“Uh, what are we going to do?” Osmond asked. “We can’t lose the bug — my boss will have my ass. That’s a two-hundred-dollar piece of equipment.”

Laffont got up and pushed through a black curtain to the van’s front seats. He moved between them and sat behind the wheel. He turned the key that was already in the ignition.

Talbot’s voice suddenly burst from the van’s speakers.

“Fuck you and your tulips, Bosch,” he said.

“Tom, wait,” Ballard said. “It’s him.”

She held her hand up for silence and Laffont killed the engine. She tapped Osmond on the shoulder.

“Ozzie, we’re still recording?” she asked.

“Still recording,” Osmond said.

They heard a car engine come to life.

“You think you rattle me?” Talbot said. “Think again, motherfucker.”

It was bizarre. It was like he knew Bosch could hear him. Then there was a sound of a cell phone ringing and Talbot put the call on his car’s speaker and answered.

“You heading home?” a woman asked.

“On my way,” Talbot said. “And, hey, I’m bringing you flowers.”

“Aww. But you better not have stolen them off a grave.”

“Nah, I picked them up on the way to visit the bitch.”

“Don’t speak that way of the dead, Greg.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what she was.”

“I know. It’s just that — ”

“And guess who was there at the grave.”

“How would I know?”

“Bosch.”

“The detective?”

“Harry fucking Bosch.”

“What did he want?”

“What do you think? To let me know he knew it was me. To bust my balls one more time.”

“You better be careful with him. He doesn’t give up.”

“Relax. If they had anything, they would have arrested me a long time ago. They would have arrested us.”

“Don’t talk like that. Just get home.”

“He’s an old man now. He can’t do anything — he’s not even a cop anymore. He retired or they kicked him out. He fuckin’ walks with a cane.”

“Doesn’t matter. He’s like a dog with a bone, that one.”

“You gotta calm down, Gloria. He’s got nothing. I got rid of everything that could connect us a long time ago.”

“Well, he must have something if he’s still coming around after twenty-five years.”

“He thinks he does, but he doesn’t have shit. Believe me, we’re in the clear.”

“I’ll believe it when he’s permanently in the graveyard with her and we don’t have to worry about him no more.”

“That can be arranged. We’ve done it before.”

“Stop. I don’t want to hear that. Just come home.”

“On my way.”

“Pick up some sourdough at the Vons first. We’ll have it tonight. I’m making Bolognese.”

“Can’t wait. I’ll hit the Vons.”

Talbot disconnected and turned on the radio. Yacht rock, Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.” The engine revved as he started to drive.

Ballard clapped Osmond on the shoulder and spoke urgently:

“We got that, right, Ozzie?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah, we got it,” Osmond said.

“Then we got him,” Laffont said.

“I think we got them both,” Ballard said. “You hear that, Harry? He said, ‘We’ve done it before,’ and she didn’t deny it.”

Before Bosch could answer, the sound from the speakers — the Steely Dan song — faded away as Talbot drove out of transmission range.

“What about the bug?” Osmond said.

“You don’t have to worry about the bug, Ozzie,” Ballard said. “We know who has it. If things work out, we’ll be knocking on his door with an arrest warrant very soon. You’ll get your bug back then, okay?” Osmond nodded reluctantly. “Harry, what were you about to say?”

“I don’t want to rain on anybody’s parade, but you didn’t get a warrant to bug the guy’s car, right?” Bosch said. “So is what we got even going to be admissible?”

“Good question,” Ballard said. “We’ll run it by Paul and if he okays it, we’ll take it to the DA.”

“No matter what the DA says, I say we take both of them down,” Laffont said. “Separate them and put ’em in jail. I’ll put money on the wife making a deal.”

“We’ll see,” Ballard cautioned. “We don’t want to blow it. Harry, was Gloria in the picture back when the murder went down?”

“Not at first,” Bosch said. “But when we started looking at him, he trotted her out as his alibi.”

“Okay,” Ballard said. “If we make a move, I’ll let you know.”

“If you knock on Talbot’s door, I want to be there,” Bosch said.

Ballard held up a fist. Bosch bumped it with his.

“Good work,” she said.

“Let’s hope so,” he said.

AS BOSCH APPROACHED his house he saw a small white car parked at the curb in front of it. Through its rear window he could see the silhouette of someone behind the wheel. Someone waiting. Bosch glanced into the vehicle as he passed and pulled into the carport. The driver was recognizable. It was the car that was not.

Bosch got out and walked out to the curb just as the front door of the small car opened and Mickey Haller stepped out.

“What happened to the Lincoln?” Bosch said. “I thought you were the Lincoln Lawyer.”

“That’s the old me,” Haller said. “The Lincoln’s not a good look for a public interest lawyer.”

He gestured to the car.

“It’s electric,” he said. “Autonomous.”

“What’s that mean?” Bosch asked. “No hands, like a Waymo?”

“Like Waymo.”

“I wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those things.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise me.”

“Everything all right? I feel like the last time you actually came up here, it wasn’t good news.”

“This time it is. You’re going to come into a chunk of money. The county is settling all the MacLaren lawsuits to the tune of four billion dollars. That’s billion, with a b.”

Bosch was momentarily stunned.

“Where’s the county going to get four billion dollars?” he asked.

“It’s paid out over five years,” Haller said. “It’s going to affect all county services, but at least they’re acknowledging responsibility. Can we go inside? I need to explain a couple things.”

Bosch headed to the front door, unlocked it, and entered, Haller trailing behind him. He threw his keys down on the hall table.

“Want a beer or something?” Bosch offered.

“Just water,” Haller said.

“Right. I forgot. You all right if I have a beer? My knee is killing me and Tylenol isn’t working.”

“Of course. Be my guest.”

Bosch went into the galley kitchen, got a Modelo out of the refrigerator, and filled a glass of water from the faucet. When he walked out of the kitchen, he saw Haller was on the back deck, looking down at the Hollywood Freeway. Bosch went over and put the glass down on the flat railing next to him.

“It’s better to look up than down,” he said.

“How do you mean?” Haller asked.

“I like to look at the treetops, not the freeway. We’ve got red-tailed hawks, ravens, even a great horned owl in the trees here.”

“Nice. So you’re a birder now?”

“I spent four hundred dollars on night-vision binoculars. So, yeah, I guess I am.”

Bosch pointed to the glass of water.

“I don’t have any fancy water,” he said. “That’s out of the tap.”

“Water is water,” Haller said.

“Tell that to my daughter. She carries around a bottle that uses ultraviolet or something to purify it.”

“I have one of those things too.”

Haller held his glass up in a toast.

“So how much do the lawyers get of the four billion?” Bosch asked.

Haller spread his arms wide as if shocked by the insulting question from his own half brother.

“You mean the lawyers who got this deal for every child who was abused?” he asked.

“Yeah, how much do they get?” Bosch pushed.

“You’ll be happy to know that under the terms of the deal, our fees are capped.”

“At what?”

“Fifty thousand per client per tier.”

“What does that mean?”

“The settlement amounts are based on severity of abuse. The most grievous cases are in tier one, the more moderate cases in tier two, and so on.”

“And who decides who goes in which tier?”

“A special master.”

“A special master decides whether a kid getting raped was grievous one or two.”

“Not that simple. Like with you — you were physically abused but not sexually assaulted. You’re in tier two.”

“How many clients did you end up with on this?”

“Nineteen.”

“What tiers?”

“Most are like you, tier two.”

“What do we get?”

“The settlement means you get four hundred thousand paid out over five years, less the fifty that will go to me. So seventy K a year for five years. You could buy a boat, go see the northern lights, do whatever you want to do with it.”

“I don’t want to do anything with it. You can take your share, but I don’t want mine.”

Haller started to laugh, then realized that Bosch was serious.

“What do you mean?” he asked. “We’ve been fighting this fight for two years.”

“I didn’t do it for the money,” Bosch said. “I did it for Charlie Lamb.”

“I get that, but if there is no punishment, there is no justice.”

“Yeah? Who pays for this justice?”

“Ultimately, the taxpayers.”

“Most of them weren’t even alive when this went down.”

“It’s the way it works. The county was responsible. It should have protected those children. It should have protected you. But it didn’t. It looked the other way. Now it has to pay.”

“Well, I don’t want it. Give mine back.”

“What about Maddie? You could give it to her. Put it in a savings account for when… you’re no longer around.”

“I’ve already got things set up for her. You’re my lawyer, right? You work for me on this.”

“Yes, you know I do.”

“I appreciate what you’ve done, and I want you to get paid, but I don’t want the money. So do what I ask.”

“All right. I think you’re making a mistake, but all right.”

“There is something I do want, though.”

“Okay, what’s that?”

“A copy of the discovery.”

“What do you mean?”

“I want everything they turned over to you lawyers. That’s why I joined the lawsuit.”

“That might be a problem.”

“How so?”

“It was sealed as part of the settlement. Very common in cases involving minors and sexual assault.”

“But you have it, correct?”

“I do, yes, but under the settlement, I have to delete all files.”

“Don’t I have to sign off on this settlement?”

“You do. That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m not signing off until I get a look at the discovery.”

“Harry, you’re not going to be able to hold this up. You have a choice: Take the settlement or don’t. Either way, the judge seals the discovery.”

“Is there a deadline?”

“End of the week. I thought this would be a no-brainer, but you’re turning it into something else. Charles Lamb died more than sixty years ago. Is there a chance in hell that there’s a suspect still alive out there? You really think you can solve something that old?”

“Maybe not, but there’s a chance that there are answers out there.”

“And say you get answers, what do you do with them?”

Bosch looked down at the traffic clogging the freeway through the Cahuenga Pass.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m coming by your office tomorrow to look at the discovery before you delete it.”

“Fine,” Haller said. “If you insist.”

Bosch nodded.

“I do,” he said.

“Then I’ll make a deal with you,” Haller said. “I’ll have everything ready for you at nine a.m. tomorrow if you take the night to think about the money.”

“Fine. See you then.”

“See you then.”

HARRY WATCHED THE new kid as he navigated the food line and then stepped out of it to find a spot. Harry remembered the hollow feeling you got when no one had explained things and you were left on your own.

The kid scanned the tables in the dining hall. Most were full or half full. There wasn’t one completely empty table the kid could seek refuge at. When the kid’s eyes came to him, Harry gave a slight nod that was taken as an invite. The kid came to the table.

“Can I sit here?” he asked.

“It’s a free country, isn’t it?” Bosch said.

The kid nodded and started to put his tray down. He was so relieved to have a spot to eat that he flubbed the landing and came in at a bad angle, knocking his apple off the tray. It rolled across the table and over the edge. Harry shot out his left hand and caught it. He gave it back.

“Here,” he said.

The new kid sat down. He was short and wore the same striped shirt that a lot of kids had. It came from a store that had donated last year’s styles. His eyes were a startling green. Harry didn’t think he had ever seen a Black kid with green eyes.

“Thanks,” the kid said.

“You know, they haven’t had apples in a long time,” Harry said.

“How come?”

“There was a food fight and people were throwing them. One kid got hit in the eye and now he has a patch, so they went into this big thing about banning hard foods you can throw.”

The kid started digging into his ham steak. Harry watched him.

“What’s your name, anyway?” he asked. “I’m Harry.”

“Charlie,” the kid said. “My friends call me Chops.”

“That short for Charlie?”

“No, it’s on account of my last name being Lamb. So, like, Lamb Chops.”

“You ever been in a place like this before, Chops?”

“Nah, first time.”

“What happened to your parents?”

“They weren’t around. My grams was taking care of me and then she died.”

Harry just nodded. Every kid had a story like that, including himself.

“What dorm they put you in?” he asked.

“I’m in the gym,” Chops said. “They waiting on a opening for me in a dorm.”

“Damn place is so crowded.”

“How long you been here?”

“Two years. You got anybody else out there?”

“My sister, but they split us up. I wish she was here with me.”

“I don’t think you should wish that for anybody. Especially a girl.”

“How come?”

“Because it’s bad for them here.”

“How come you asking me who I got out there?”

“’Cause I know where you got that shirt. It means you got nobody to bring you stuff. Like me.”

Before Chops could respond, another two trays came down hard on the table and two boys sat down. One was Eaton and the other was Stokely. Bosch braced for trouble.

“Hey, new guy,” Eaton said. “The colored kids eat at those tables.”

He pointed to the far corner of the dining hall, where there were two long tables with bench seating. It was where Blacks and Mexicans sat — if they didn’t want trouble.

Chops looked indignant, but he also looked a bit scared.

“I’ll go with you,” Harry said.

They both got up and walked away from the table, side by side.

“It’s not worth it with those guys,” Harry said. “They want you to fight them, so the best thing is to stay away.”

They got to the long tables and climbed into spots across from each other. At two years in, Harry had been at MacLaren longer than most of the other kids. He knew everyone at the table.

“Hey, this is Chops,” he told them. “He’s new.”

“He better be new,” said an older girl named Velvet. “Otherwise he shouldn’t never been anywhere near those two crackers.”

“We were there first,” Chops said.

“That don’t mean shit, little brother,” Velvet said. “Not with them two.”

Harry looked across the table at Chops, waiting to catch his eye. When he did, Harry just nodded. He was telling Chops that he was safe. For the . . .