The Concrete Blonde

If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?

I'm relaxed, Belk. I call it Zen and the art of not giving a shit.

That's justice," she said, nodding at the statue. "She doesn't hear you. She doesn't see you. She can't feel you and won't speak to you. Justice, Detective Bosch, is just a concrete blonde.

The house in Silverlake was dark, its windows as empty as a dead man’s eyes. It was an old California Craftsman with a full front porch and two dormer windows set on the long slope of the roof. But no light shone behind the glass, not even from above the doorway. Instead, the house cast a foreboding darkness about it that not even the glow from the streetlight could penetrate. A man could be standing there on the porch and Bosch knew he probably wouldn’t be able to see him. ‘You

That’s extortion,” Cerrone said. “No, asshole, that’s justice.

The black heart does not beat alone.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you….

Nobody in this world is who they say they are. Nobody. Not when they’re in their own room with the door shut and locked. And nobody knows anybody, no matter what they think... The best you can hope for is to know yourself. And sometimes when you do, when you see your true self, you have to turn away.

To think about failure was to invite failure.

the best defense was a good lock or a mean dog. Or both.

Through political opportunism and ineptitude, the city had allowed the [police] department to languish for years as an understaffed and underequipped paramilitary organization. Infected with political bacteria itself, the department was top-heavy with managers while the ranks below were so thin that the dog soldiers on the street rarely had the time or inclination to step out of their protective machines, their cars, to meet the people they served. They only ventured out to deal with the dirtbags and consequently, Bosch knew, it had created a police culture in which everybody not in blue was seen as a dirtbag and was treated as such. Everybody.

In the morning, Bosch sat on the rear deck of his house and watched the sun come up over the Cahuenga Pass. It burned away the morning fog and bathed the wildflowers on the hillside that had burned the winter before. He watched and smoked and drank coffee until the sound of traffic on the Hollywood Freeway became one uninterrupted hiss from the pass below.