Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch is an LAPD detective for the Hollywood Division. He was raised in Southern California by his mother, a sex worker who was strangled in Hollywood when Bosch was only 11 years old. He bounced around group homes before joining the army, serving in the Vietnam War as a tunnel rat for the First Infantry Division. Upon returning to the United States, he joined the Los Angeles Police Department; his life story, as Agent Wish describes it, consists of “one flawed societal institution after another” (94). Bosch rose through the ranks of the LAPD quickly, before clashing with his superiors and being demoted from the elite Robbery-Homicide Division.

Bosch is a thin, wiry man of average height. He is 40 years old, is left-handed, and has graying hair and a mustache. He lives on a steady diet of jazz, coffee, beer, and cigarettes. Bosch has symptoms of PTSD from his wartime experiences, which allows the novel to consider Vietnam Veterans’ Trauma more broadly; primarily, he has insomnia and nightmares about his time in the tunnels. His defining characteristic is being the “loner type” (192); when a clerk asks him for “a six-letter word for a man of constant sorrow and loneliness” (229), Bosch suggests his own name.