"Lost Light" is yet one more pungent, hurtling, intricate Michael Connelly caper that thrusts a throbbing read at you. A young woman's murder four years ago, complicated by a robbery-murder on a movie set, further roiled by a coffee shop shooting and the inexplicable disappearance of an FBI agent, are the ingredients of the polyphonic plot that drives LAPD detective Harry Bosch, now retired, to delve for answers to long-unanswered questions. Bosch no longer has a badge nor the resources of the LAPD to help him hack his way through tangles of deceit and danger. But he still has a few friends to lend a reluctant hand when he needs it most. And he has the Mercedes ML55 that he bought after retirement from a guy moving to Florida. The $55,000 price was steep, but not too steep for the fastest SUV on the road and one that blends in, since "every fifth car in L.A. was a Mercedes, or so it seemed." You might ask what's the use of a fast SUV when freeways have turned into parking lots. But "getting there" is half the fun, as Bosch's saxophone instructor says. Although a bit battered, Hieronymus Bosch will get there in the end. A lot of the guys who stand in his way will not.

-- Eugen Weber

*Middle Earth

Poems

Henri Cole

Farrar, Straus & Giroux: 58 pp., $23

In 1949, Wallace Stevens -- 35 years along in his argument that God should be spelled with a lowercase "g" and six years shy of his supposed deathbed conversion -- wrote that "[t]he great poems of heaven and hell have been written and the great poem of earth remains to be written." He was being modest, but happily poets such as Henri Cole continue to respond to his challenge. "Middle Earth," Cole's transcendent fifth collection, is a gift to pagan literature.

A questioning Catholic, Cole finds another religion in seeing. These are the poems of a conjurer, ceremonial and hypnotic. He sets the mood in the title poem, turning down the lights and beginning an ars poetica mantra: "I repeat things in order to feel them, / craving what is no longer there. / The past dims like a great, tiered chandelier. / The present grows fragmentary / and rough."

This collection marks the birth of Cole, a writer in his late 40s, as a poet for a wider audience. He displays his sense of humor and takes an unguilty pleasure in his visions. The animal poems get funny; the creatures are more human and less tame. He is a remarkable fabulist, now writing the poems of his career. "I felt like a realist, recovering from style," he says in a poem. It isn't true: He is still afflicted by great style (and rhythm and rhyme and timing), and the realism -- of emotional pitch and wisdom -- is spectacularly dressed up.