The late show

Michael Connelly, 1956-

Book - 2017

"Renée Ballard works the night shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing none as each morning she turns her cases over to day shift detectives. A once up-and-coming detective, she's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor. But one night she catches two cases she doesn't want to part with: the brutal beating of a prostitute left for dead in a parking lot and the killing of a young woman in a nightclub shooting. Ballard is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her own partner's wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night. As the cases entwine they pull her closer to her own demons and the reason s...he won't give up her job no matter what the department throws at her."--

Saved in:

1st Floor Show me where

MYSTERY/Connelly Michael
3 / 3 copies available
Location Call Number   Status
1st Floor MYSTERY/Connelly Michael Checked In
1st Floor MYSTERY/Connelly Michael Checked In
1st Floor MYSTERY/Connelly Michael Checked In
Subjects
Genres
Detective and mystery fiction
Thrillers (Fiction)
Suspense fiction
Mystery fiction
Published
New York : Little, Brown and Company 2017.
Language
English
Main Author
Michael Connelly, 1956- (author)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
"Introducing Detective Renée Ballard" -- dust jacket cover.
Includes an excerpt from Two kinds of truth.
Physical Description
405, 31 pages ; 25 cm
ISBN
9780316225984
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

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.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 30, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review

*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

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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.


Review by Library Journal Review

LAPD officer Renée Ballard was relegated to the "late show," the midnight to 8 a.m. street patrol, after her allegation of sexual harassment against her supervisor Lieutenant Olivas was dismissed. On duty one night, she and her partner respond to a robbery and are directed to two crime scenes: the brutal beating of a transgender prostitute and a multiple shooting. Rather than pass off the robbery to the detective squad, Ballard volunteers to investigate. She also probes the other incidents on the sly-in the case of the shooting, against Olivas's direct order. Her intuition tells her the shooter was a police officer, namely her boss. This new police procedural series' lackluster entry by the creator of the Harry Bosch series (The Wrong Side of Goodbye) pits the driven Ballard against an increasingly hostile Olivas. While the action builds in the second half, it is halfhearted, and the quick and tidy solutions to the robbery and beating are anticlimactic. An early reference to Bosch is gratuitous. Verdict Fans will clamor for Connelly's new protagonist, who is a female Bosch, caring and driven to finding the truth at all costs, but she will need more grit to survive.-Edward Goldberg, Syosset P.L., NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The 30th novel by the creator of Harry Bosch (The Wrong Side of Goodbye, 2016, etc.) and the Lincoln Lawyer (The Gods of Guilt, 2013, etc.) introduces an LAPD detective fighting doggedly for justice for herself and a wide array of victims.Ever since her partner, Detective Ken Chastain, failed to back up her sexual harassment claim against Lt. Robert Olivas, her supervisor at the Robbery Homicide Division, Rene Ballard has been banished to the midnight shiftthe late show. She's kept her chin down and worked her cases, most of which are routinely passed on to the day shifts, without complaints or recriminations. But that all ends the night she and Detective John Jenkins, the partner who's running on empty, are called to The Dancers, a nightclub where five people have been shot dead. Three of thema bookie, a drug dealer, and a rumored mob enforcerare no great loss, but Ballard can't forget Cynthia Haddel, the young woman serving drinks while she waited for her acting career to take off. The case naturally falls to Olivas, who humiliatingly shunts Ballard aside. But she persists in following leads during her time off even though she'd already caught another case earlier the same night, the brutal assault on Ramona Ramone, ne Ramn Gutierrez, a trans hooker beaten nearly to death who mumbles something about "the upside-down house" before lapsing into a coma. Despite, or because of, the flak she gets from across the LAPD, Ballard soldiers on, horrified but energized when Chastain is gunned down only a few hours after she tells him off for the way he let her down two years ago. She'll run into layers of interference, get kidnapped herself, expose a leak in the department, kill a man, and find some wholly unexpected allies before she claps the cuffs on the killer in a richly satisfying conclusion. More perhaps than any of Connelly's much-honored other titles, this one reveals why his procedures are the most soulful in the business: because he finds the soul in the smallest procedural details, faithfully executed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.