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.
Meadows's solace after the war had been heroin, while Bosch had turned to detective work, and now Bosch vows to bring the killer to justice. His search leads him on a dangerous quest that will force him to face enemies within his own department as well as doubts within himself.
When the trail of evidence links Meadows's murder to a major theft at a local safetydeposit vault by burglars who entered via a complex tunnel system beneath the bank, Bosch finds he must join ranks with the FBI and team up with a mysteriously aloof yet tantalizingly attractive agent, Eleanor Wish. The two overcome their initial differences -
and together unravel the threads connecting Meadows's murder, the bank heist, arid. the fall of Saigon in 1975, but ultimately, Bosch must face alone a tide of betrayal and death and make an anguished decision between justice and vengeance