USA TODAY International Edition
Renee Ballard returns in Connelly’s ‘Sacred Night’
Advice for the novelist: Apparently if you want to really buckle down and focus on your career, the best move is to start producing a hit TV show as a side gig.
At least, that appears to be the course taken by the superhuman Michael Connelly, whose superb recent pair of crime novels, “Two Kinds of Truth” and “The Late Show,” rise to the level of his best work from the ’90s while coinciding with his supervision of the Amazon series “Bosch,” based on his prickly LAPD hero Harry Bosch.
Connelly’s hallmark has been his precise, faultless plotting, which is embedded in a fatalistic vision of noir Los Angeles. That has never changed, but for the past 13 years he has used it partly in the service of an entertaining but slight sequence about Mickey Haller, aka “the Lincoln Lawyer.”
Recently, however, Connelly seems reinvigorated. “Two Kinds of Truth” found Bosch working cold cases out of unfamiliar San Fernando, and “The Late Show” introduced a terrific new lead character, Renee Ballard, a promising young cop working nights because the department wouldn’t believe her allegation of sexual assault against another officer.
Now, in “Dark Sacred Night” (Little, Brown, 448 pp., his 21st Bosch novel and second Ballard, Connelly has paired the two leads. It’s a choice that might have come one book too soon.
“Dark Sacred Night” is about another cold case. Bosch is hunting for clues about the long-forgotten disappearance of a runaway named Daisy Clayton, his curiosity ignited by a painful acquaintance with her mother. He sneaks into the police department during the small hours – the “late show,” as it’s called – and starts to rifle old files for information. The officer on the floor happens to be Ballard.
What ensues is, for Connelly, a fairly meandering and uncertain story of their ad hoc partnership.
In an interview, the author has said, “I didn’t think as I started out that Renee Ballard could ever muscle into the universe that was already occupied by Harry Bosch … but the unexpected happened. Renee ended up being too fierce, too interesting and too undeniable.”
True. “The Late Show” was fantastic, certainly as a mystery but especially for Renee, who sleeps in a tent on the beach with her dog and surfs before work. She’s the complete opposite of the ancient Bosch, that is, except with the same stubborn commitment to justice that drives him.
The difficulty is that Bosch is a character so well-known to readers that Ballard teeters between deference and independence in “Dark Sacred Night,” a little at loose ends. You wish he’d given the character one more book of her own.
Fortunately, by the end of their collaboration, Connelly hits his stride. He has always been especially good when it comes to truly creepy killers – he was once a crime reporter – and his denouement here is thrilling.
If Bosch and Ballard work together again, a whole book with the same pace, suspense, and clever teamwork could make for something genuinely special. Maybe he just needs to write a second hit TV series first.