"Los Angeles is surrounded by valleys, but there's only one Valley..."
Hush Money, by Peter Israel
In The Closers, the new mystery by Michael Connelly to be published in May 2005, fictional cop Harry Bosch returns to the LAPD and chases bad guys all over the Valley. The book begins with the murder of a high school girl on Oat Mountain, in the Devonshire police division known to Bosch as Club Dev because there is so little crime there. The investigation leads to a dive bar on Sepulveda, a gas station at Tampa and Roscoe, Mariano Street in Woodland Hills, and a fictional private school in Porter Ranch called Hillside Prep, among other Valley locales. On the finer points of traditional Valley cuisine, Bosch instructs his partner Kizmin Rider:
"I did Dupar's on the way in so I'll be fine. Unless we see a Cupid's around. I'd go for that.
Connelly knows his way around the Valley, where he used to cover police and crime for the Times. But in The Closers the cops decide to flush out the killer(s) by planting a story in the Daily News: "It's the Valley paper."
