BONE CANYON

The bones found in the San Fernando Valley’s Hueso Canyon send Robbery­-Homicide Detective Eve Ronin up against the very last people she wants to tangle with.

Stalked by Hollywood producers and writers who want to put her high-profile debut case onscreen or create a TV series around her and criticized as a camera-chasing diva by resentful colleagues, Eve would love to have the bone fragment horror screenwriter Sherwood Minter finds on the edge of his property be a routine discovery. But forensic anthropologist Dr. Daniel Brooks quickly unearths more bones and identifies them as those of Sabrina Morton, who vanished six years ago shortly after filing a rape complaint that was investigated by Detective, now Assistant Sheriff, Ted Nakamura. When the evidence indicates that Sabrina’s rapists were most likely officers in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Eve, who feels as if “I’ve already become a television character,” faces some tough choices about how far she should push the case and whom she can trust. The mystery deepens when Dan, as Eve now calls him, finds part of an 11th finger in Hueso Canyon. Clearly Sabrina’s body wasn’t the only one left there. How are the victims connected, and what hope do Sabrina’s embittered parents have of getting justice for their long-forgotten daughter? When her fellow cops regard her with suspicion and everyone else around her, from her neglectful mother to her long-absent father to the veteran agent trying to get her to take a meeting, wants a piece of Eve, it’s hard to see how she can focus enough to solve the case—especially given the last-minute trick Goldberg has up his sleeve.

Best in its disturbingly timely portrait of the police’s “blue wall” fortified to repel even the most intrepid crusaders.