{"id":24548,"date":"2026-07-18T06:39:42","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T12:39:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/learningturkey.com\/blog\/?p=24548"},"modified":"2026-07-18T09:57:28","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T15:57:28","slug":"book-38-of-52-desert-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learningturkey.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/book-38-of-52-desert-star\/","title":{"rendered":"Book 38 (of 52) – Desert Star"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Desert Star – Michael Connelly<\/p><\/div>\n

A year after quitting LAPD, Detective Ren\u00e9e Ballard was brought back to run a revamped cold case unit.\u00a0 With a rag tag bunch of civilian volunteers, Ballard reaches out former detective Harry Bosch, using a case from his past as the bait.\u00a0 Focusing on the death of a councilman’s sister as a teen, they get lucky with some DNA that would have been useless at the time, finding a match to another cold case.\u00a0 Working the two, they are able to uncover a suspect, one close to their vest.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Bosch works his own case, tracking his suspect down to Florida.<\/p>\n

In the fifth entry of his Ren\u00e9e Ballard series, Desert Star<\/em>, Michael Connelly continues to team her up with his old Harry Bosch character, first introduced in 1992\u2019s The Black Echo<\/em>.\u00a0 At the end of this book, Connelly seems to indicate that Bosch is on his way out, but there is another entry in the Ballard series that he appears in and another mainline Bosch book due out later this year, so who knows what the future holds.\u00a0 This book was the basis for the first season of the Ballard<\/em> series on Amazon Prime, which I stopped watching after two episodes once I found out and will now pick back up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A year after quitting LAPD, Detective Ren\u00e9e Ballard was brought back to run a revamped cold case unit.\u00a0 With a rag tag bunch of civilian volunteers, Ballard reaches out former detective Harry Bosch, using a case from his past as the bait.\u00a0 Focusing on the death of a councilman’s sister as a teen, they get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5037,12340,12341,11634,12159],"class_list":["post-24548","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-39","tag-amazon-prime","tag-ballard","tag-desert-star","tag-michael-connelly","tag-the-black-echo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningturkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24548","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningturkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningturkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningturkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningturkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24548"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/learningturkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24548\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24550,"href":"https:\/\/learningturkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24548\/revisions\/24550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/learningturkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24548"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningturkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24548"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/learningturkey.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24548"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}