Give crime writer Michael Connelly credit.
He knows that the career and shelf life of his greatest creation — the laconic but always determined Harry Bosch — is spiraling toward a not-too-pretty end. Now, clearly in his 60s, the ex-Los Angles Police detective has hacked off nearly every boss he’s encountered in his nearly 30-year campaign to right all the wrongs in the City of Angels.
Even his current stint as reserve detective for the tiny San Fernando Police Department may be yanked from under him because of a stupid mistake he makes while investigating an unsolved murder in Connelly’s newest book, “Dark Sacred Night.”
But to revive Bosch’s fledgling drive to deliver a measure of justice in this world, and to jolt some youthful energy into the Bosch series, Connelly introduces Harry to Renée Ballard, who we met for the first time last year in Connelly’s “The Late Show.” Ballard is an LAPD detective who is also an outsider. She lives on the beach with her dog and her only family is a grandmother she sees only occasionally.
Ballard refused the sexual advances of a senior detective, filed a harassment complaint against him, and was banished to the late shift when her colleagues refused to back up her allegations. And like Bosch, she hates it when someone gets away with murder, so aligns herself with Bosch to investigate the cold-case murder of 15-year-old prostitute Daisy Clayton.
The first meeting between Bosch and Ballard is low-key but amusing. Ballard returns to her desk at the Hollywood Division and finds an older man with gray hair and “the mustache that seemed to be standard with cops who came on in the seventies and eighties” rifling through some old records. Ballard readies her Glock to use on Bosch but quickly learns about his quest to find Clayton’s murderer.
Clayton’s body was found in a trash bin in Hollywood nine years earlier. Bosch is so invested in the case, he is letting Daisy’s mom stay with him while she is trying to get off drugs.
Ballard asks her superior if he knows Bosch. “Everybody knows Harry Bosch,” he tells her, solidifying his legend in the LAPD. Ballard decides she could learn something from Bosch, while Bosch recognizes a kindred spirit in Ballard, and the two are quickly off probing the death of Clayton.
But Connelly quickly establishes the Clayton case is not the only one each investigator has to work. The novel goes back and forth betweenBosch figuring out who ordered the execution-style slaying of a vicious gang leader while Ballard solves — Sherlock Holmes-style — the death in a house high up on Hollywood Boulevard.
Connelly, as usual, delivers a fast-paced story that doesn’t disappoint. Along the way, Bosch briefly reveals to Ballard how deeply lonely he is while Ballard admits to herself how Bosch reminds her of her long-lost father.
The two also learn they can depend on each other in deadly situations. It’s a relationship that might be built to last.
