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Onyx reviews: Dark Sacred Night by Michael Connelly
Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 08/14/2018
When Hollywood Division detective Renée Ballard finds ex-LAPD detective
Harry Bosch snooping around in old case files, her interest is piqued. Bosch,
who now volunteers his services to the San Fernando Police Department, helping
them close cold cases, has no business accessing those cabinets, but
following regulations has never Bosch's way of doing things.
Ballard, introduced in The Late Show, works
the night shift, a far cry from her previous assignment at
Robbery-Homicide. Her current posting is punishment: she accused her
former lieutenant of sexual misconduct, but her
partner didn't back her up. She's more of a stickler than Bosch about doing things
by the book, but she isn't beyond bending rules a little—although she
usually stops short of breaking them. When she isn't on duty, she retrieves her
dog from "doggie day care" and sets up a tent on the beach, the
closest thing she has to a home. A trusted lifeguard (her occasional lover)
makes sure she isn't disturbed while she sleeps to the sound of the crashing
waves.
Ballard hasn't encountered Bosch before, but his
reputation precedes him. Her assignment affords her plenty of free time, and she's currently flying solo because
her partner is on bereavement leave, so she decides to look into
what he was doing. She figures out he's investigating the decade-old unsolved
murder of fifteen-year-old Daisy Clayton, a runaway whose body
was found in a dumpster, and learns that Clayton's mother is staying at his
house, a situation that has been causing friction between him and his daughter,
Maddie, now a university undergrad.
Bosch was looking for Hollywood Division's so-called "shake cards,"
controversial police records of encounters with
individuals who were questioned but never arrested. Individually, they serve
little purpose, but in a database they provide a searchable record of
potentially suspicious activity
in the area. Ballard knows where the cards are stored and uses this knowledge as
a bargaining chip to get herself attached to Bosch's investigation.
It takes the two cops a while to trust each other. Ballard has to be
particularly careful about giving Bosch access to information to which he is no
longer entitled. With her career already on a siding, and some of her colleagues
trying to sabotage it further, she worries that getting
tangled up with Bosch might derail it completely. They make a good team,
though, balancing and modulating each other. Given their significant age
difference (Ballard is closer to Bosch's daughter's age than to his), Connelly
wisely chooses to avoid any trace of romantic spark between them, keeping the
relationship purely professional.
Ballard can't work the cold case full time. She has to deal with the
usual call-outs in her area. The first case in Dark Sacred Night involves a suspected homicide where the victim's cat ate part
of her face. Others include the theft of valuable Warhol prints. a
group of juveniles attempting to spy through skylights into a strip club and
another missing persons case that has Ballard searching a dump for body parts. By the
same token, Bosch is also working on the cold case murder of a gang member, an investigation that puts others—and
himself—in deadly peril. These "secondary" cases are mostly
peripheral to the Daisy Clayton investigation that forms the novel's main plot,
but they allow Connelly to do what he does best: show cops in their daily
routine.
Sifting through the "shake cards" by hand is a long, tedious
process, but it begins to bear fruit. Potential suspects are identified and investigated, but a lot of time has
passed. Cops who might help illuminate the situation have retired or died
in the interim. Their dogged persistence begins to pay off,
coupled with a modicum of good luck. Except Bosch and Ballard live in a world
where there are few happy endings, which may be why Connelly chose to name the
book using the ominous phrase "dark sacred night" from the otherwise
uplifting song lyrics of Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World."
Harry Bosch has been a homicide cop, retired, had his retirement deferred,
and ultimately become a volunteer with San Fernando PD. By the end of the book, it appears that he is about to embark on yet another chapter
in his long and storied career.
Web site and all contents © Copyright Bev Vincent
2018. All rights reserved.
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