Somebody Didn’t Count in the Fourth Bosch Novel

SPOILER ALERT: This column reveals a few key plot twists in The Last Coyote. Its target audience is people who have already read the book.

Ten pages into Michael Connelly’s fourth novel, Harry Bosch mouths the five words that would become his motto: “Everybody counts or nobody counts.”

It’s interesting that this mantra is first chanted at the beginning of The Last Coyote as Bosch’s mission in the book (to find his mother’s killer) embodies this grand humanist statement that our efforts must benefit everyone, even those society scorns. Bosch’s mother Marjorie Lowe had been a prostitute, and Bosch had been ten when her semi-clad body was found in an L.A. dumpster. He knew the police at the time hadn’t done all they could to find his mother’s killer, and now Bosch is determined to.

The use of the “Everybody counts” motto is also notable because it’s in The Last Coyote that Bosch – and Connelly – ignore the five-word maxim. This is one of Connelly’s finest novels, a complex and often overlooked book, but it’s also the one book in the Bosch series in which not everybody counts.

The novel opens with Bosch on paid leave for assaulting a superior. During an argument, he had thrown his commanding officer, Lieut. Harvey “Ninety-Eight” Pounds, through a glass partition in the Hollywood Homicide office. Connelly made an interesting decision about the plot before he even began writing the book. Bosch’s assault on Pounds is one of the most iconic scenes in the Bosch series, and not just because it manifests Bosch’s hatred of bureaucratic superiors. It’s a moment of high tension and was used effectively as the climax of Season 1 of the Bosch TV series on Prime. It sets up not only The Last Coyote but also A Darkness More Than Night. But in the series of novels, it happens “off-camera”, between books. We never actually see it and only find out what happened as backstory midway through The Last Coyote.

Bosch decides to use his time in purgatory to investigate his mother’s murder, retrieving the murder book and evidence box from police archives and retracing her steps the night she died. Meanwhile, the LAPD brass also force him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation with psychologist Carmen Hinojos. We first caught glimpses of a psych report on Bosch in The Black Echo, and Honey Chandler dove deeper into the detective’s psyche during the cross examination in The Concrete Blonde. But now in Book 4, we do a deep dive into how Bosch is wired.

His investigation into his mother’s murder unearths so many components of Bosch’s personality that have been buried for years, much of which is analyzed during his therapy. While it adds depth to Bosch’s character, it also reveals what Los Angeles cops endured in the 1990s. Hinojos even has a term for this psychological condition – blue angst.

“Can you think of anything more stressful to be in this city during the last few years than a police officer?” she asks Bosch. “Between Rodney King and the scrutiny and villainy that brought, the riots, fires, floods and earthquakes, each officer on this force has had to write the book on stress management and, of course, mismanagement.”

Though Hinojos rejects Freudian analysis of dreams, and even though symbolism is hardly a hallmark of Connelly’s writing, the author has Bosch tell the shrink about a coyote he’s seen near his house, and that the coyote is appearing in his dreams. The coyote becomes a symbol of Bosch (a loner and survivor) and of a vanishing breed of police officer.

“I guess there’s not too many left in the hills in the city – least near where I live,” Bosch tells Hinojos. “So whenever I see one, I get this feeling that it might be the last one left out there. You know? The last coyote. And I guess that would bother me if it turned out to be true, if I never saw one again.”

When not attending these weekly psych sessions, Bosch investigates his mother’s murder with a ferocious dedication. The probe focuses on a group of city politicos who went on to become wealthy and/or influential. Crashing a fundraiser at a mansion owned by one of these oligarchs, Bosch leaves his name as Harvey Pounds because he doesn’t want them to know that he, Bosch, is monitoring them. Having lost his own badge due to his suspension, Bosch swipes Pounds’ badge to use during his investigation.

What seems like a bit of hijinks goes badly wrong. Bosch’s investigation takes him to Florida, and he returns home to learn that Pounds is dead. Pounds had got a call at home one night and told his wife he had to go meet someone, and he was found later, tortured and murdered. Bosch is an early suspect because of their previous altercation, and he’s carrying the murdered Lieutenant’s badge. If the investigators find it in Harry’s possession, Bosch is finished.

This twist ratchets up the tension because Bosch is in such peril, but it also creates an emotional explosion because Bosch knows he’s responsible for another officer’s death. There’s no grey area here. The killers zeroed in on Pounds because Bosch had used the Lieutenant’s name as he spied on them. If Bosch had not been so fast and loose in his conduct, Harvey Pounds would not have been brutally murdered.

“Bosch knew in the dark part of his heart that he was responsible,” writes Connelly. “He didn’t know how or when it had happened but he knew.”

Bosch tells Hinojos he will be haunted by this incident, but he wasn’t. In Trunk Music, which takes place about a year after The Last Coyote, we learn that Bosch “spent months not burying it [his involvement in Pounds’ death] but putting it where he could deal with it.” But there’s no long-term, overwhelming remorse on Bosch’s part. When Pounds is mentioned in A Darkness More Than Night, Bosch dismisses his former boss by saying he was a dipshit.

Pounds was indeed a dipshit, but the motto says everybody – even a dipshit – counts or nobody counts. Pounds’ friends and family, his wife and children, deserved to know what had happened to this man, but they never did. (A great idea for a Bosch book: Harvey Pounds’ son or daughter becomes a cop and investigates their father’s death. Maybe even asking Ballard’s cold case unit for help.)

The simple fact is that Marjorie Lowe counted and Bosch found her killer – as it should be. But Harvey Pounds didn’t count. If he had counted, Bosch would have made a full disclosure to the investigators. His wink and nod to Irvin Irving that he was somehow involved just doesn’t cut it.

The Last Coyote is such an invaluable installment in the Bosch canon because it blends the most personal investigation of Bosch’s career with the penetrating insights of Carmen Hinojos. Though the plot is among Connelly’s best, it’s not what distinguishes the novel. What makes it outstanding is that it reveals the complexity of Harry’s character better than the other books. It’s a hugely ironic book, though it’s impossible to discern whether Connelly intended the irony. In solving his mother’s murder, Bosch shows conclusively that everybody counts, even a prostitute left in a dumpster. But Bosch can fall short of his own ideals because, in the end, Harvey Pounds didn’t count.

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Peter Moreira is the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Go to the home page of this website to sign up for a free prequel.