Terry McCaleb and Graciela Rivers have an infant daughter named Cielo, and McCaleb's fishing charter business is running full-time on
Catalina Island. Nevertheless, sheriff's deputy Jaye Winston asks McCaleb for help in investigating the ritualistic murder of a suspect named Edward Gunn. As McCaleb analyzes the clues, they seem to point toward
LAPD detective Harry Bosch, whom McCaleb knows from a previous investigation before his retirement. Bosch is currently a key witness in a separate high-profile murder case involving movie director David Storey, who is on trial for murdering an actress during sex and staging her death to look like
autoerotic asphyxiation. Author/reporter Jack McEvoy is covering the case. After McCaleb alerts police to Bosch's probable involvement in the murder, Bosch goes to Catalina himself to challenge McCaleb's work and to ask him to re-examine the evidence. Based on a parking ticket that McCaleb finds, he concludes that Bosch may have been set up by Storey in order to discredit his evidence at trial; however, the key evidence in proving that is a post office surveillance tape that was in the process of being erased and from which nothing usable can be recovered. Nevertheless, Bosch and McCaleb pretend that they have recovered something from the tape. This prompts Rudy Tafero, Gunn's actual killer and an ex-cop who handled security for Storey, to target McCaleb. Bosch saves McCaleb and captures Rudy, in the process killing Rudy's younger brother Jesse. In return for not being charged with felony-murder in his brother's death, Rudy turns over evidence implicating Storey in the plan to frame Bosch, and Storey agrees to plead guilty. However, McCaleb realizes that Bosch was around to save him only because Bosch knew all the details of Gunn's death and had lied to McCaleb; McCaleb breaks off any renewed relationship with Bosch as a result. Bosch then "baptizes" himself in a plan for a fresh start. ==Adaptation==