A Partnership Made for "the Solve"
Detectives Bosch and Ballard are at it again in another mystery from one of our best living crime writers.
If you are a longtime reader of Michael Connelly, you probably have your copy of his new novel (his thirty-sixth!), The Dark Hours, already. You may have devoured it immediately, or perhaps you’ve set it aside for an upcoming getaway offering lots of uninterrupted time.
But what if you haven’t tried him? Would this new book provide a good starting place?
Even though one of Connelly’s strengths is the way in which he develops his recurring characters over the long haul (above all his signature creation, Harry Bosch), you wouldn’t feel at all lost if you started reading him here. And if you find it to your taste, there’s plenty of time to go back to his 1992 debut novel, The Black Echo, in which we first meet Bosch, a legendary and longtime LAPD homicide detective.
The Dark Hours is the fourth of Connelly’s novels to feature his most recent recurring character, Renée Ballard, who works for the LAPD. Ballard first appeared in the 2017 novel The Late Show (police slang for the night shift), and then a year later, in Dark Sacred Night, she teamed up (unofficially) with Bosch, who has parted ways with the department and is working for its tiny counterpart in San Fernando. By 2019’s The Night Fire, in which they work together once again, he is freelancing. And here in The Dark Hours they are once again investigative partners.
It was audacious of Connelly, in this time of rampant identity politics, to create a protagonist who is not only a woman but is decades younger than the author. But Connelly has long excelled in portraying women—not least, I think, because he is the sort of writer who seeks out feedback and insight from people he knows and trusts. He has repeatedly acknowledged his gratitude, in particular, to Detective Mitzi Roberts of the LAPD. I don’t know the makeup of Connelly’s vast readership, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that women at least slightly outnumber men, if not constituting a clear majority.
While the differences between Ballard and Bosch are obvious (and sometimes provide humor, as when Bosch’s relative cluelessness regarding the digital world is contrasted with Ballard’s savvy), Connelly gives more emphasis to what links them: childhood trauma, first, so that neither of them could thereafter take stability and blessed ordinariness for granted, and then (in their exceptional cases, following from that experience) a compassion for victims, not only among the living but also among the dead, and a fierce determination to achieve such justice as can be found.
In Connelly’s superb 2017 novel Two Kinds of Truth, which sets up Bosch’s stint at the San Fernando PD, there’s a passage that reveals what Bosch and Ballard have in common: “At a period of life when most men took up golf or bought a boat, Bosch felt resolutely incomplete. He was a closer.” (The same is true of Ballard, whom Connelly introduced in another novel later that year.) “When Chief Valdez [of the SFPD] reached out to Bosch and said he had an old jail cell full of cold cases and no one to work them, it was like a lifeline had been thrown to a drowning man.”
Compare that to a passage early on in the new book, The Dark Hours, which begins with an unsparing picture of the LAPD demoralized and adrift in the period following the killing of George Floyd and the massive protests against “the police” that followed. Connelly neither romanticizes the cops (he never has, as his longtime readers well know) nor paints them all (and the indispensable work they do) with the same brush. Ballard, we learn early on, has thought about quitting because “the department went from being proactive to reactive, and the change had somehow cast Ballard adrift.” That and the experience of repeatedly having people spit in her face.
That is, “until the Midnight Men came along”: a two-man team of rapists (a great rarity), who are assaulting and humiliating single women in their own beds. Their sudden appearance galvanizes her, and her resolve is strengthened by a murder on New Year’s Eve. A man has been shot, and although it looks like an accident at first (in a “celebration” gone awry), it is soon revealed to be a murder: “She knew this could be the solve she needed to save herself.” And before long, Ballard asks Bosch to join her in the investigation.
Ultimately, of course, no matter how many “solves” we achieve, we can’t save ourselves. That would come as no surprise to Michael Connelly. But perhaps some of the time, maybe even a lot of the time, even those of us who believe that “Jesus saves” are a bit too ready to shrug aside the calling to redress injustice and cruelty and contempt here and now, uncomfortable and even risky as that often may be.
In addition to its many pleasures for the reader, a book such as The Dark Hours can offer more: an uncomfortable prod to self-examination.
Don’t miss the newest episode Bibliography featuring beloved novelist James Lee Burke. Click here to listen now.
Nota Bene: All books linked in this newsletter take you to our Bookshop.org page. We appreciate your support and hope you will patronize your local bookshops.