Congratulations, Harry Bosch. You have a new literary love child to help you fight the seedy underworld of Los Angeles.
Her name is Detective Renée Ballard and she is the driving, jarring force in writer Michael Connelly’s latest crime novel, “
Ballard appears ready to take over for Bosch, who Connelly created over two decades ago as a rogue fighter for the underdog in the LA Police Department. But these days he is an older and more settled man who left the LA department in a heated dispute.
Bosch has not even met Ballard. But Harry would probably approve of her.
Ballard’s dogged approach to solving murders hacks off her bosses in the department even if the victims are society’s cast-offs. She speaks bluntly and she finds political intrigue inside the department annoying and a barrier to true justice for victims.
Sounds clichéd? Probably in lesser hands. But Connelly made it all part of a Harry Bosch’s ethos when he began writing his Bosch books in the early 1990s.
Bosch is in his 60s now, worried about how he is going to pay for his daughter’s college tuition. He is even the subject of an Amazon Prime television series. The series — which exists in the real world — gets a mention in “The Late Show,” probably to contrast the different stages Bosch and Ballard now occupy in their lives and careers.
Although a promising investigator, Ballard has been relegated to the late shift — “The Late Show” — because she filed a sexual harassment claim against her boss. Her former partner refused to back up her allegations because he was worried about his career.
Ballard doesn’t even have a real home. She keeps a change of clothes in a van and lives mostly on the beach and uses time on her paddle board to free her mind of the horrors of her job.
Ballard grew up in Maui but watched her father drown in a surfing accident. Her Hawaiian mother abandoned her, and she is now only close to her grandmother and Lola, a rescued pit bill.
Her current partner is decent enough and “a good cop when he wants to be.” But he prefers to be at home with his terminally ill wife.
So by nature and circumstances, Ballard take on most of her cases by herself. And in one night, she encounters some doozies.
One victim is a cross-dresser who has been brutally beaten. Connelly was a former crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, and he uses that skill to relay cop-speak to the reader in clear and not-so-politically correct tones.
“Drag queens, cross-dressers and transgenders were all generally referred to as dragons in vice,” Connelly writes. “No distinctions were made. It wasn’t nice but it was accepted. Ballard had spent two years on a decoy team in the unit herself. She knew the turf and she knew the slang. It would never go away, no matter how many hours of sensitivity training cops were subjected to.”
Later on the same night, a “four on the floor in a club on Sunset” is reported — four shooting victims in one booth. A fifth victim, a waitress, is found near an exit.
Ballard, despite facing overt antagonism from her former boss, takes on each case in breathtaking fashion. She follows every clue to exhaustion and along the way fights her way out of a house where she was stripped of her clothes, and bound and gagged by a suspect who owns brass knuckles that say “Good” and “Evil.”
There are a lot of characters and a good dose of sober forensic science in “The Late Show.” But typically Connelly makes it all seem relevant and key to solving every crime.
It makes you want to say: “It’s all good, Harry Bosch. Put your feet up. Renée Ballard is on the job.”
