Dark Sacred Night

Michael Connelly is back in Dark Sacred Night (Little Brown, $29.00). Once again, we see Harry Bosch, now 69, retired, and working cold cases for San Fernando Valley Police, a much smaller force than the LAPD. He meets up with the character whom Connelly created in The Late Show, Renee Ballard, a young feisty detective who in the prior book was demoted to the LAPD graveyard shift because of her refusal to submit to the advances of a superior while trapped in the women’s restroom. Unique among cops, she’s homeless, living with her dog in a tent on the beach while maintaining a theoretical address at her grandmother’s. A true free spirit.

Unlike the traditional crime/thriller, the two detectives are not working together and there is not one particular crime that they are investigating. Instead, we get a vignette of sordid single confrontations that our heroes run into while all along the death of a young woman nine years prior haunts Bosch, because he has allowed the woman’s mother to move in with him. It doesn’t appear to be romance but rather mutual grief which has drawn the two together. Bosch’s daughter, a college student, is completely opposed to the arrangement and as in every Connelly book he explores the darkness in Bosch’s background and family. It doesn’t get much darker than a former tunnel rat in Vietnam.

For want of things to keep her busy on the graveyard shift, Renee volunteers to help Bosch sift through crime reports from the time and area where the young girl was found dead. In the mean time she has to take down a two hundred-pound burglar, deal with teenagers peeking into a strip club and the usual politics of her station. Bosch gets distracted by the murder of a witness to another killing that he is investigating, but somehow in the end Connelly weaves his way back to the murder of the dead girl.

Connelly is perhaps the greatest living crime writer and the subtle clue he places early on in the book works well. Connelly never abuses his role as writer with an “unfair” solution. Even the seemingly unimportant peeping Toms work into the mystery’s resolution. The ending is probably not quite as satisfying as you might wish for in view of the depravity of the killer. Nevertheless, it wrapped up nicely.

Renee is tough, willing to bend the rules and is a nice fit for Bosch, who never saw a rule that didn’t need twisting. Personally, I don’t think Connelly is as good as he was twenty years ago in books like Concrete Blonde, but give the guy credit, he plows ahead in his thirty-first novel and is still excellent. It moves fast, and I would have to give it a solid A-.

Steve E Clark  as seen in the New York Times is Author of  Justice Is for the Lonely  and  Justice Is for the Deserving,  Kristen Kerry Novels Of Suspense. You can purchase his books via SteveClarkAuthor.com/BuyBook or request it at your local book store.  Want to know more about Steve Clark, read more reviews or speak directly with Steve?  Learn more about Steve at SteveClarkAuthor.com