Oline H. Cogdill of the Sun Sentinel called the novel "superb" and praised its "heart-wrenching" ending. Chris Hewitt of the Minnesota Star Tribune wrote: "Both cases are absorbing and Ballard's outings with Bosch have made her a sharper character." A review in Kirkus Reviewsopined that of the two murder cases featured in the novel, the Pearlman cases is "considerably more interesting—partly because the break that leadsthe unit to a surprising new suspect turns out to be both fraught and misleading, partly because identifying the killer is only the beginning of Bosch's problems", while the Gallagher case is "more heartfelt but less wily and dramatic." The review concluded that the novel is "Not the best of Connelly's procedurals, but nobody else does them better than his second-best."