Detective Renée Ballard is working the night beat and returns to Hollywood Station in the early hours to find a stranger rifling through old file cabinets. The intruder is retired detective Harry Bosch, working a cold case that has gotten under his skin. Ballard can't let him go through department records, but she wants in.
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.
