Harry Bosch and Detective Renée Ballard join forces once again in the murder case that haunted Bosch's mentor.Back when Bosch was just a rookie detective in the Homicide Department, he had a mentor who inspired him and taught him to take the job personally and never give up on any case. But now Jack Thompson, his mentor, is dead. His widow gives Bosch the file of a homicide case that her husband had taken from the Los Angeles Police Department twenty years ago. It concerns the unsolved murder of a disturbed young man.

Bosch shows the case to Ballard and asks for her help to discover what had piqued Thompson's interest so many years ago. As she begins her investigation, while also dealing with her own cases on the midnight shift, she starts to uncover elements of the original investigation that don't "fit" together. Soon, the two of them will arrive at a troubling question: Why did Thompson steal the case file? 

Was it because he wanted to work on the case after his retirement, or because he wanted to make sure it would never be solved? Written with the known rapid pace and masterful suspense for which Connelly has been distinguished as the ultimate master of crime fiction, The Night Fire continues the "unofficial" collaboration of the two unstoppable detectives.