The late show

Honestly, how hard can it be to write a likable hooker? (Give her a brutish ex-husband, have some thug hold her for ransom, and take her shopping on Rodeo Drive.) But it takes real talent to write a coyote with personality. Petty is up in the Hollywood Hills, waiting for a ride, when he sees two coyotes trotting down the middle of the road, "one of them shooting him a hateful yellow glare" as it ambles past. To add insult to injury, it smirks at him when he tries to shoo it away. Even inanimate objects come to life in Lange's world: "Tumbleweeds bounded across the road, flashing in the headlights like fleeing animals." The caper plot is tidier (and more violent) than Lange's usual free-form efforts, with a solid back story about Army buddies conniving to retrieve the cash they made from stolen goods ("everything from computers and printers to microwaves and washing machines") in Afghanistan. The book is most fun, though, when it focuses on Petty's clever ruses to separate the rubes from their life's savings. Through trial and error, the con man has learned that a yellow safety vest, a baseball cap and a clipboard constitute an all-purpose disguise for real estate scams. And the telephone is his friend when he just wants to rustle up a few bucks for breakfast. Lange's bread and butter are his quick studies of colorful characters, many of whom die here in unpleasant ways. So it's only fitting when those who are still alive at the end raise their glasses on New Year's Eve in a toast "to the lucky and the unlucky, the swindlers and the swindled, the living and the dead." ?? ace atkins and his devoted readers, Tibbehah County, Miss., is no less real than Yoknapatawpha County was to Laulkner and his followers. So the first thing you do with THE FALLEN (Putnam, $27) is take a quick head count to make sure all your favorite characters are still standing. Sheriff Quinn Colson is back in office and oblivious to the adulation of his deputy, Lillie Virgil. Dances are still held at Sammy Hagar's Red Rocker Bar and Grill, gossip still traded at the Lillin' Station diner. And fear not, Lannie Hathcock is still doing land-office business at Vienna's Place (formerly known as the Booby Trap and still the "best strip club south of Memphis"), where happy hour dances are still a reasonable $20 per lap. Tibbehah has been an outlaw haven since bootlegging days, so it's a professional insult when out-of-town robbers steal $192,000 from the Pirst National Bank. But even that major crime is overshadowed when two local girls go missing and everyone fears the worst. What Atkins understands is that regional mysteries can go only so far when updating local crime patterns. It's O.K. to rob the town bank, but you can't burn it to the ground. MEDIEVAL VENICE SPREADS out her treasures for religious pilgrims in S. D. Sykes's CITY OF MASKS (Pegasus Crime, $25.95) - not the aesthetic riches of La Serenissima or the material wealth of her Doges, but the kind of treasure that buys a place in the afterlife. If they hustle, pilgrims can amass heaps of indulgences by praying at iconic shrines containing "the feet of Mary the Egyptian, the ear of St. Paul the Apostle and the molar of Goliath." Oswald de Lacy, Lord Somershill of Kent and the amiable amateur sleuth in this series, has not come to the city for the shrines. De Lacy is a gambler, and Venice has some of the most infamous dens of iniquity in Europe. But once he's lost his purse, there's no sport left but to solve the murder of Enrico Bearpark, grandson of a great Venice patriarch who suspects the boy was killed by his male lover. "A murderer will hang in this city," the old man informs de Lacy, "but a sodomite is always burned." Needless to say, this investigation is an extremely sensitive one, even for a dab hand like de Lacy. Michael connelly introduces a new sleuth in the late show (Little, Brown, $28), a detective named Renée Ballard who can almost, if not quite, lift her own weight among the tough guys in the Los Angeles Police Department. Most nights are slow on the late shift, with Ballard looking for wandering Alzheimer's patients and signing off on suicides. But this new cop has a personal mission to find her late partner's killer without undermining the last case they worked together, one that she rightly calls "big evil." Worse, she's being pilloried in the press, thanks to false information being leaked by someone at her own station. There's nothing wrong with Ballard's case or her serious work habits. It's just that she doesn't seem to be having as much fun as all the guys. ? Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.

*Starred Review* Connelly has been doing much more with his female characters lately: in The Burning Room (2014), his longtime series lead, Harry Bosch, shared screen time with rookie detective Lucia Soto, who emerged as a fully fleshed out, multidimensional character, and in The Wrong Side of Goodbye (2016), Bosch is paired with Bella Lourdes, another young detective who profits from Harry's mentoring while showing she's more than capable of stealing a scene from the veteran. Now, perhaps inevitably, Connelly goes a step further: debuting a new series starring a female detective, Renée Ballard, who has been exiled to the night shift after unsuccessfully challenging the LAPD's old-boy network by bringing sexual-harassment charges against her boss. Chafing at the lot of the late show detective, who must launch investigations only to turn them over to the day shift when morning comes, Renée continues to investigate, off the books, two crimes that land on her plate: the beating of a prostitute and the murder of a cocktail waitress. Connelly's special genius has always been his ability to build character like the most literary of novelists while attending to the procedural details of a police investigation with all the focus of anEd McBain. He does both here, showing us Renée on her surfboard, working out her Bosch-like demons, but also grinding through the minutiae of the case until she achieves that Holy Grail of detective work, that moment of knowing she has her man. Many established crime writers James Lee Burke, Ian Rankin, Randy Wayne White have launched new series as their signature heroes age, but few have done it as successfully as Connelly. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The success of Amazon's Bosch TV show has enlarged Connelly's already enormous fan base, making this the perfect moment to launch a new print series.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2017 Booklist

The title of this excellent series launch from bestseller Connelly (The Wrong Side of Goodbye and 20 other Harry Bosch novels) refers to the midnight shift at LAPD's Hollywood Division. Det. Renée Ballard has landed there in retribution for filing sexual harassment charges against her former boss, Lt. Robert Olivas. Two major crimes soon concern Ballard: the vicious beating of a woman, who says she was assaulted in the "upside-down house" but passes out before she can explain, and a nightclub shooting that kills five people. Though most "late show" cops hand off cases to their day shift counterparts, Ballard personally investigates the assault (with official approval) and the nightclub shooting (without). Olivas, who's leading the latter investigation, wants her nowhere near the case. What follows is classic Connelly: a master class of LAPD internal politics and culture, good old-fashioned detective work, and state-of-the-art forensic science-plus a protagonist who's smart, relentless, and reflective. Talking about the perpetrator of the assault, Ballard says, "This is big evil out there." That's Connelly's great theme, and, once again, he delivers. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.