THE BLACK ECHO

Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1992, 1^st/1^st.  ISBN 0-316-15361-3.  Hard cover, 375 pages.  Black boards with gold lettering on spine, small spot on upper front board, spine ends lightly bumped; binding sound.  Dust jacket with price intact has some edge and cover wear, some scratches and light rubs; vertical crease on front flap, small soil spot on verso.  Book interior clean and unmarked.  ‘LAPD homicide detective Hieronymus (aka Harry) Bosch is a loner and a nighthawk.  Son of a prostitute who was murdered when he was a boy, raised in orphanages and foster homes, he has been shaped by hard choices and solitude, and by his experiences in Vietnam.  Called out on what appears to be a routine drug overdose case, Bosch soon realizes that this is no accidental death, and that the victim found lying in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is someone from his own past.  Billy Meadows was a fellow “tunnel rat” who had served in the same unit in Vietnam, twenty years earlier.  Together they had tried to rout the Viet Cong from a network of underground passages and there had confronted the horror of the “black echo” – the reverberation of one’s own naked fear.’ (from front flap)