While away the dark hours immersed in Michael Connelly’s latest thriller, THE DARK HOURS, and chances are you’ll be catching the dawn.
Featuring Connelly’s most enduring character, Harry Bosch and recent creation, Renee Ballard, THE DARK HOURS is as contemporary as Covid and malevolent as misogyny.
THE DARK HOURS begin New Year’s Eve when the Los Angeles Police Department is all hands on deck, overtly in uniform, to keep the peace as the populace party in the New Year.
Ballard is on duty when called to a shooting that may have been a tragic accident of negligent exuberance. Bit Ballard determines that it’s a brazen execution and her investigation leads to a cross over cold case, an unsolved homicide assigned to Harry Bosch.
Ballard and Bosch team up to follow the ties. Simultaneously, Ballard is working a sexual assault case concerning a pair of rapists dubbed The Midnight Men.
THE DARK HOURS is not so much a police procedural as a police political, as Connelly burrows into a corrupt and moribund culture of the LAPD, an institution battered by pandemic and public unrest, a culture riddled with racism and misogyny.
To Ballard, as Bosch had already surmised, the department was more interested in seeking to protect and serve its own rather than the public and that succour and justice for the victim and the prosecution of the perpetrator had been sidelined.
Up against a brittle police force riddled with inertia and ineptitude as well as brutal rapists and brazen murderers, Ballard and Bosch have each others backs as they relentlessly pursue justice for all.
This is the fourth novel featuring Renee Ballard and the third where she has teamed up with Harry Bosch. Her evolution from by-the-book detective shafted by the department to relentless, renegade, rule-bending, pain in the rectum, result driven combustion engine, is enthralling.
As the world is getting darker with dark deeds and dark webs, we need the twin beams of Ballard and Bosch to cast light and make the darkness visible.
THE DARK HOURS by Michael Connelly is published by Allen & Unwin
Featured image: Author Michael Connelly
Richard Cotter