What a wonderful world, with its skies of blue and clouds of white, the brightness of day, the dark sacred night.
Only the dark sacred night can be a dark scary place, an unhallowed precinct for predators preying specifically on young women.
Michael Connelly’s latest thriller, DARK SACRED NIGHT has his detective hero of some seventeen previous adventures, Harry Bosch, team up with his latest creation, Renee Ballard, to heat up a cold case that’s become personal.
Both Bosch and Ballard are working other cases separately, he with the San Fernando Police Department, she on the late show with the LAPD.
It’s a prickly pairing, both law enforcers swinging on a precarious pendulum of pragmatism over the pit of procedure and protocol. There’s blind eye turning and hand ear blunting as strict lawfulness is eschewed to snuff lawlessness.
But it’s a professional courtship that, while courting disaster, proves positive in the apprehension of perpetrators past and present.
Connelly continues to entertain and thrill with his perfect mix of police procedural and complex and contrasting character studies.
Bosch is getting more cantankerous with age, imbued with a feeling that there might not be much more time left to close the cold cases he’s become obsessed with. He has crisis of his own competence, although experience and instinct come to the fore to counterbalance any lapses in judgement.
His appraisal of Ballard is acute, for instance, forging an alliance that is not only case breaking but life saving. She is as diligent, dedicated and dogged a detective as Bosch, and, like him, has experienced the belligerence, bureaucracy and just plain bullshit of her employer.
Ballard continues to grapple with the gender politics of the police department and the loss of her father at sea.
DARK SACRED NIGHT is subtitled A Ballard and Bosch Thriller, which, in tandem with the book’s Batman allusion finale, suggests this dynamic duo will team again.
Who knows, Mickey Hallar may get in on the act.
DARK SACRED NIGHT by Michael Connelly is published by Allen & Unwin.
