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"I closed the phone and sat there surrounded by another man's obsessions but thinking about my own ... I thought about seven thousand unanswered voices from the grave. That was more than the number of stars you see when you look up into the sky at night."

-- The Narrows

Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly's publisher, Little, Brown and Company, has taken extraordinary steps to protect The Narrows' secrets.

As noted in the accompanying article, no " uncorrected proofs" or "Advance Reader Copies" -- special preview editions of books prepared for booksellers, reviewers and select opinion shapers -- were prepared for Michael Connelly's 14th novel.

Review copies of the finished version of the book -- a sequel to Connelly's 1996 standalone novel The Poet -- were shipped the week of April 5. The Narrows went on sale for the general public on May 3, so everyone gets a fair shake at sharing Connelly's white-knuckle ride before anyone can spoil crucial plot points.

The further challenge for reviewers is that in discussing The Narrows, it is quite possible to wreck the experience of reading its predecessor, The Poet -- soon to be released in a new edition with an introduction by Stephen King.

That said, The Narrows is a dream novel for Connelly fans. The author places together his top cop, retired LAPD legend Harry Bosch, retired FBI profiler Terry McCaleb (Blood Work, A Darkness More Than Night), tarnished FBI agent Rachel Walling (The Poet) and a disguised Cassie Black, the master thief featured in Connelly's second standalone novel, Void Moon. He also revives his most chilling villain.

The Poet tracked Walling's and journalist Jack McEvoy's pursuit of an ingenious serial killer who murdered McEvoy's twin brother -- a Denver-based homicide detective. The killer's slayings were staged to look like suicides and victims' "suicide letters" cribbed from the poems of Edgar Allen Poe.

It's 2004, and Harry Bosch is asked by a widow of a friend to investigate her husband's possible murder.

Rachel Walling simultaneously receives a call indicating that "The Poet," presumed dead by most, may be back in business.

Connelly masterfully blends Boch's pursuit (Harry speaks in first person, a narrative technique introduced in Connelly's previous novel, Lost Light) with Walling's investigation (related largely in third-person voice).

Walling's and Bosch's eventual partnership -- and Bosch's continued friction with an inept and arrogant FBI (an adversarial relationship established in Lost Light) -- heighten the tension of The Narrows.

Connelly's detective is also weighing an offer to return to a depleted and foundering LAPD and he struggles with fatherhood, having recently learned he has a toddler daughter.

The action moves between Los Angeles and Las Vegas (and, for several hapless men, gives the lie to the current PR axiom that what happens in Vegas "stays in Vegas" ... Well, the bodies do.).

There are sly winks at earlier books for the Connelly faithful, and McCaleb's brilliance as an FBI profiler is established by his prescient takes on the cases of Elizabeth Smart and Laci Peterson.

Throw in a hundred-year flood, the death of a key character and a final, stunning plot twist you'll never see coming, and you have a Connelly classic that will have fans deprived of those spoiler-laden ARCs burning up Internet bandwith with chatter for months to come.

Many of those who buy The Narrows in its first days of release will also receive a copy of its companion DVD, Blue Neon Night: Michael Connelly's Los Angeles.

This unprecedented accompaniment to the novel includes a comprehensive overview of the author's works to date, as well as commentary by Michael Connelly about the real-life inspirations for many of the events and people contained in his acclaimed novels.

Connelly, a former crime reporter once short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize, revisits old crime scenes he covered as a journalist, as well as the real-world inspirations for many settings featured in his novels. Several of these vignettes feature shots of Connelly tooling through the streets of LA, echoing earlier films based on the works of fellow-LA crime novelist (and acknowledged Harry Bosch inspiration) James Ellroy.

William Petersen, star of CSI and the first film adaptation of Thomas Harris' Red Dragon, supplies extremely effective readings of excerpts from Connelly's novels.

For his previous book, Lost Light, Connelly produced a limited-edition CD that cleared the way for a similar disc of tunes for fellow crime novelist George Pelecanos' current release, Hard Revolution. (Scottish crime novelist Ian Rankin has expressed his own desires for a companion CD for his next book).

It will be interesting to see if Blue Neon Night is the vanguard for similar DVDs -- perhaps Walter Mosley's Watts or Pelecanos' Washington, D.C.