A look at Michael Connelly’s new novel
The Harry Bosch series started out bleak and, with the passing years, has only gotten bleaker. The deepening of the gloom certainly has something to do with the aging of its hero. Back in 1992 when Michael Connelly first introduced Bosch in “The Black Echo,” he was an LAPD detective in the prime of his lonely life.
True to hard-boiled form, Bosch eventually ran afoul of police bureaucracy and got nudged into early retirement. In the most recent novels in the series, Bosch has been working as a reserve detective for the cash-strapped San Fernando Police Department. In his downtime, Bosch digs into cold-case homicides. Melancholy hangs thick as smog over this series as Bosch, heading into the end zone of his life, realizes that there will never be enough time to fix all that needs fixing in this world gone wrong.
Perhaps because Connelly himself needed a bit of a break from Bosch’s company, he debuted a new detective last year in the novel “The Late Show.” LAPD Detective Renée Ballard is half Bosch’s age, but her worldview is hardly any sunnier. How could it be, when she works “the late show,” as the graveyard shift is called in police slang? Shunned by many colleagues because of a sexual harassment complaint she filed against a superior, Renée has a personal life that makes Harry’s look healthy.
“Dark Sacred Night” is billed as the first “Ballard and Bosch novel” and it is ingenious, frantically suspenseful, and very, very bleak. In mathematics, two negatives multiplied together equals a positive; in “Dark Sacred Night,” however, the pairing of these two negatively charged detectives only intensifies the despair.
When the novel opens, Renée has just figured out the solution to a particularly grisly tableau of death in a house high up on Hollywood Boulevard. Upon returning to her desk at the Hollywood Division, Renée spots a stranger — 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 another detective’s file cabinets. Renée sneaks up behind the intruder with her Glock at the ready.
Of course it’s Harry. Turns out he’s trying to find old notes on the Daisy Clayton murder — a cold case that obsessed him in his last outing, “Two Kinds of Truth.” Daisy was a 15-yearold runaway-turned-prostitute whose body was found in a trash bin in Hollywood nine years earlier.