Editors Reads Verdict
Trunk Music is Connelly at his most Los Angeles, tracing the circuits between Hollywood money, organized crime, and the city's particular capacity for reinvention — with Bosch as the detective who refuses to let any of it stay buried.
What We Loved
- The Hollywood-Las Vegas crime corridor is rendered with vivid insider texture
- Bosch's personal life develops in ways that add genuine emotional stakes to the investigation
- The organized crime procedural elements are rigorously researched and credibly deployed
Minor Drawbacks
- The Las Vegas section, while entertaining, slightly diffuses the tight Los Angeles focus of earlier entries
- The conspiracy's full shape takes longer to emerge than optimal pacing would allow
Key Takeaways
- → Money and crime flow along the same channels in Los Angeles — the entertainment industry is not exempt
- → Reinvention is Los Angeles's founding myth, but the past has a way of collecting on its debts
- → Institutional interference in investigations is always about protecting something other than justice
- → Bosch's personal entanglements are never separate from his professional ones — both are forms of commitment
| Author | Michael Connelly |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Little, Brown |
| Pages | 416 |
| Published | April 1, 1997 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Crime Fiction, Mystery, Thriller |
Trunk Music Review
“Trunk music” is mob slang — a body in the trunk is the signature of a professional hit, a message as much as a method. When Harry Bosch is called to a Rolls-Royce parked off Mulholland Drive and finds a Hollywood film producer shot twice in the back of the head, the killing reads like borrowed language: organized crime aesthetics applied in a city that has always been good at borrowing and repackaging.
Trunk Music is Michael Connelly’s most explicitly Los Angeles novel in the sense that it traces the city’s defining economic and cultural circuit: the entertainment industry and its perpetual need for financing, and the organized crime networks willing to provide it. Tony Aliso, the dead producer, has been laundering mob money through his low-budget film production company, and his death sends Bosch east to Las Vegas — to the casinos and their backrooms, where the real transactions happen.
The investigation is Connelly at his procedural best. Bosch works the case with the accumulated intelligence of a detective who has spent years learning how money moves in Los Angeles, and the Las Vegas sequences give the novel a different atmospheric texture — the fluorescent, climate-controlled unreality of casino culture against the dry desert air. The contrast clarifies something about both cities.
What distinguishes Trunk Music in the series is how much it develops Bosch’s personal life. His relationship with a woman from his past becomes genuinely complicated in ways the investigation forces into the open. Connelly has always used Bosch’s personal entanglements as mirrors of his professional obsessions, and here that technique is deployed with particular skill.
Harry Bosch Reading Order
Trunk Music is Book 5 in the Harry Bosch series. The novel stands alone as a mystery but benefits from familiarity with Bosch’s character and history established in earlier entries.
Our rating: 4.3/5 — A richly atmospheric entry that expands Bosch’s Los Angeles into Las Vegas, tracing the organized crime networks that run beneath Hollywood’s surface glamour.
Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "Trunk Music" about?
A Hollywood film producer is found shot dead in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce in the hills above Mulholland Drive. The method — two bullets, body in the trunk — is a classic mob signature. Bosch's investigation pulls him from the Hollywood entertainment industry into the organized crime networks of Las Vegas.
What are the key takeaways from "Trunk Music"?
Money and crime flow along the same channels in Los Angeles — the entertainment industry is not exempt Reinvention is Los Angeles's founding myth, but the past has a way of collecting on its debts Institutional interference in investigations is always about protecting something other than justice Bosch's personal entanglements are never separate from his professional ones — both are forms of commitment
Is "Trunk Music" worth reading?
Trunk Music is Connelly at his most Los Angeles, tracing the circuits between Hollywood money, organized crime, and the city's particular capacity for reinvention — with Bosch as the detective who refuses to let any of it stay buried.
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