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.