Of the myriad things Connelly does superbly as a crime writer, perhaps one of the least heralded is his ability to bring characters together from different series ... Connelly does what he has always done over 31 previous novels, from taking extreme care with procedural detail...through getting inside his characters’ heads and revealing a nest of ambiguity as well as dark sides ever eager to express themselves. A guaranteed chart-topper again for Connelly.
Dark Sacred Night is billed as the first 'Ballard and Bosch novel' and it is ingenious, frantically suspenseful, and very, very bleak ... Let’s just say that in the spectacular final third of Dark Sacred Night, the two detectives learn the hard way that they have each other’s backs.
Connelly has written several novels featuring Bosch’s half brother, lawyer Mickey Haller, as well as stand-alones about other Bosch-adjacent characters. But none of them has clicked with Bosch in the way that Ballard does — like a master with a student who could become his equal ... moments [focussing on the charcters' pasts] don’t slow the plot, however, which charges ahead ... Ballard brings a fresh perspective, and Bosch brings all the things so many readers love about him.
Michael Connelly does it again. Just when you think you know where the story’s going, Connelly shakes things up in a big way, ramping up the suspense before delivering one of his most shocking endings yet ... Dark Sacred Night is another must-read thriller from one of the greatest crime writers of our time.
What ensues [in the novel] is, for Connelly, a fairly meandering and uncertain story of [Bosch and Ballard's] ad hoc partnership ... The difficulty is that Bosch is a character so well known to readers that Ballard teeters between deference and independence in Dark Sacred Night, a little at loose ends. You wish he’d given the character one more book of her own. Fortunately, by the end of their collaboration Connelly hits his stride.
Fans who don’t think the supporting cases run away with the story will marvel at Connelly’s remarkable ability to keep them all not only suitably mystifying, but deeply humane, as if he were the Ross Macdonald of the police procedural.
