Review by New York Times Review
EVEN RUGGED HE-MEN like Jack Readier need to sleep once in a while. In PAST TENSE (Delacorte, $28.99), Lee Child's wandering hero is on an epic road trip in search of his roots. Reacher has made his way to his father's birthplace in Laconia, N.H., where he finds the remains of his family home in the rubble of Ryantown, a settlement that grew up around a tin mill that turned out to be an ecological disaster. At its peak, Reacher discovers, the mill "seemed to be universally accepted as a horrific tableau of clouds of smoke and raging fires and boiling metals, like a miniature hell." Intrigued, he sticks around to learn more. While Reacher is occupied with his research, another drama is unfolding at the isolated motel where a young Canadian couple, Shorty Fleck and Patty Sundstrom, are stranded when their clunker of a car breaks down. After a number of guests arrive carrying disposable luggage and archaic weapons, it slowly dawns on Shorty and Patty that "something is not right." By this time, they've been locked in their room, left to wonder, with mounting dread, exactly what kind of lethal games are being played. Child's writing seems unusually expressive in this novel, possibly because of its intimate subject matter. While making inquiries around town, Reacher is invited inside the home of a man who keeps 12 dogs. "The screen door creaked all the way open ahead of him, and slapped all the way shut behind him, which were in his limited experience the eternal sounds of a New England summer." It's a startlingly sweettempered image, coming from a big bruiser like Reacher - and a reminder that Child is one writer who should never be taken for granted. MYSTERY LOVERS READ for Story - except when we read for character. DARK SACRED NIGHT (Little, Brown, $29), the latest novel from Michael Connelly, has a narrative that keeps veering off the main line and onto side tracks. Harry Bosch, the semiretired hero of Connelly's police procedurals, is obsessed with the unsolved coldcase murder of Daisy Clayton, a 15-year-old runaway whose short career as a prostitute ended when her body - used, abused and washed clean with bleach - was found in an alley. On this case, Renée Ballard, a young cop attached to the Hollywood Division of the L.A.P.D., makes a terrific partner for the old lion. She does the methodical inside work while Bosch rashly steps on the toes of the Mexican Mafia and nearly gets killed. The plot is too disjointed, but Connelly's robust characters more than compensate: from Daisy's drug-addicted mother to a murdered tattoo artist whose only body art was the crucifix around her neck. One of the most vivid is a sensitive cop who committed suicide before the story even opens, but lives on through the poetic entries left behind in his notes. "Subject is a human tumbleweed," he writes of one person of interest to the police. "Goes where the wind blows him. Will blow away tomorrow. Nobody will miss him." SOME PEOPLE welcome the night: hotel managers, nightclub pianists, "Saturday Night Live" interns. Also burglars like Junior Bender, the personable protagonist of Timothy Hallinan's comic mysteries. In NIGHTTOWN (Soho Crime, $26.95), a woman in a cheap orange wig hires Junior to break into the Los Angeles home of an eccentric recluse, lately deceased, and steal an antique doll. Junior wasn't born yesterday, so he figures there's something inside this doll. But before he can pull off the heist, he's got to calm his nerves because, in his professional opinion, "the place absolutely hummed with malice." Hallinan is exceedingly funny when describing colorful crooks like Louie the Lost, a getaway driver with no sense of direction, and Stinky Tetweil, a grossly fat fence who surrounds himself with exquisite objets d'art. Hallinan's eclectic narrative also extends to insights about 19th-century spirit photography ("It would be kitsch if it weren't so callous") and a Native American legend about human shadows. This one's good for what ails you. was this absolutely necessary? To pull the plug on Frank Elder, I mean. John Harvey's British sleuth solves his last case in BODY & SOUL (Pegasus, $25.95), further depleting the fast-disappearing ranks of wise and compassionate detectives. To soothe the sting, Elder is reunited with his estranged daughter, Katherine. Headstrong and willful even at the best of times, she becomes self-destructive at others: After her love affair with an artist turns sour, she tries to kill herself. Then he's found murdered in his studio. Well-rounded, sympathetic characters have always been a hallmark of Harvey's work, and he's at his best here. Katherine's mood swings are uncomfortably real, as she's desperately in love one minute and the next just plain desperate. Cad though he is, her feckless lover, the painter Anthony Winter, is still recognizably human. But the richest character of all is Elder himself, tough on the job but stopped in his tracks by a song. What is it about that Billie Holiday standard "Body and Soul"? His reply: "The helplessness of it, I suppose." 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 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* 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. Many writers have attempted this gambit, but too often it winds up feeling artificial, like a mere guest-star turn. Not so with Connelly, who first brought then-LAPD detective Harry Bosch together with lawyer Mickey Haller, adding backstory and depth to both characters, and who now introduces Harry to Renée Ballard, from The Late Show (2017). Bosch is retired from the LAPD now and working cold cases for the San Fernando PD, while Ballard continues to toil on the night shift. They meet when Harry is discovered by Renée doing some surreptitious snooping in department files. Harry can't stay away from an extremely cold case involving the rape and murder of a teenage prostitute in Hollywood; Renée, intrigued by the case and with her own reasons for pursuing abusers and killers of women, teams up with Harry off the books. Meanwhile, both cops have cases on their front burners that could play havoc with their lives and careers. Connelly does what he has always done over 31 previous novels, from taking extreme care with procedural detail, showing cops digging for facts wherever they can be found, through getting inside his characters' heads and revealing a nest of ambiguity as well as dark sides ever eager to express themselves. So it happens here, as Bosch, attempting to follow his personal creed ""Everybody counts or nobody counts"" wanders into some very deep water. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A guaranteed chart-topper again for Connelly, as the success of the Amazon Prime series Bosch heads into production for its fifth season, creating more synergy for the books, which continue as strong as ever.--Bill Ott Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
LAPD Det. RenAce Ballard, first seen in 2017's The Late Show, makes a welcome return in this outstanding, complex police procedural. Relegated to the night shift at the Hollywood Station following a sexual harassment suit against her former lieutenant, Ballard works her cases with a quiet focus and intensity. Late one night, Ballard surprises a man looking through some old case files. It turns out to be retired LAPD detective Harry Bosch, now working cold cases for the San Fernando PD. After Bosch leaves, Ballard takes a look at the file, detailing the unsolved 2009 murder of Daisy Clayton, a 15-year-old runaway. The slain girl was the daughter of a recovering addict, who has been taken in by Bosch. Ballard is hooked, and begins working the case with Bosch. Meanwhile, Bosch's investigation into another cold case, the execution-style killing of a 52-year-old gang leader, has put the detective squarely in the sights of Varrio San Fer 13, one of the valley's most violent gangs. Bosch and Ballard, both outsiders with complicated pasts, form a perfect partnership in this high spot of Edgar-winner Connelly's long and distinguished career. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (Oct.) c Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Night shift detective Renée Ballard (The Late Show) of the LAPD Hollywood Division returns from a scene early one morning to find a stranger rummaging through an office file cabinet. She soon learns that the man is retired detective Harry Bosch, and he's looking into the cold case murder of a teenage girl. After reading up on the case, Ballard approaches Bosch and offers to help. She learns that the dead girl was the daughter of a woman living in Bosch's house-a woman he met while working undercover as a pill shill (Two Kinds of Truths). Digging through field interview cards from nearly a decade before, the detectives uncover a lead. At the same time, Ballard is working a homicide and Bosch is looking into a gang killing for the San Fernando Police Department. Despite a structural formula of parallel story lines similar to other recent Bosch entries, the partnership between the detectives makes it feel fresh. Bosch's reckless instincts are tempered by Ballard's by-the-books attitude. VERDICT Mystery-suspense readers will not only enjoy this quick read but will look forward to the duo's continuing partnership. [See Prepub Alert, 4/23/18.]-Vicki Briner, Broomfield, CO © Copyright 2018. 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
Harry Bosch, who just can't stay retired, unwillingly teams up with a Hollywood detective who has reasons of her own for wanting in on his latest cold case.It may be nine years since 15-year-old runaway Daisy Clayton was grabbed from the streets of Los Angeles and killed, but the daily presence of her mother, Elizabeth, in Harry's lifeshe's staying at his place while he helps her stay cleanmakes it a foregone conclusion that he'll reopen the case. On the night Bosch drops into Hollywood Division to sneak a look at some of the old files, he's caught by Detective Rene Ballard, who was bounced from LAPD Robbery/Homicide to "the late show," Hollywood's third shift, after her complaint about aggressive harassment by a superior went nowhere. Bosch needs to find out who was responsible for what happened to Daisy; Ballard needs to work a case with teeth, even if she's partnering with a reserve investigator in the San Fernando Police Department (Two Kinds of Truth, 2017, etc.) who'd rather work alone. Before they get what they need, they'll have to wade through a double caseload as grueling and sometimes as maddeningly routine as you can imagine, from an apparent murder that turns out to be a slip-and-fall to an ancient gang killing whose repercussions flare to sudden life to the theft of some valuable Andy Warhol prints to a missing man who's not just missingnot to mention Elizabeth's sudden disappearance and Ballard's continuing lack of support, and sometimes even backup, from her department. Not even the canniest readers are likely to see which of these byways will end up leading to the long-overdue solution to the riddle of Daisy Clayton's death.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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
