New, fierce sleuth

Michael Connelly has spent much of his career writing about Harry Bosch, the brooding detective who has a long, checkered history with the Los Angeles Police Department and an obsessive dedication to his work.

But as Connelly recently told The Washington Post, he’s stuck with the fact that Harry was born in 1950 and can’t pass for the brash, rebellious type as easily as he used to. In 2005, the author addressed that problem by introducing Mickey Haller, aka the Lincoln Lawyer, Harry’s younger, more devious half-brother.

Now that both of them are well established, Connelly has again felt the need for something new — and swung for the bleachers. The Late Show introduces a terrific female character: Detective Renée Ballard.

Connelly has never had much success writing memorable women in supporting roles, but this new star is a beauty. Ballard has been banished to the police department’s night shift — the Late Show — because of an ugly incident with her boss. She also feels betrayed by her former partner, and her new partner wants to spend as much time as possible with his wife. So Ballard operates as a lone wolf, Southern California-style.

She doesn’t exactly live anywhere. When her shift ends, she greets the morning by pitching her tent at the beach, changing clothes in her van, getting out her paddle board and hitting the waves, washing away the horrors of the night before. Ballard grew up in Maui. Her father, a surfer raised in California, drowned; her Hawaiian mother wants nothing to do with her. Her closest companions are the grandmother she seldom sees and Lola, her beloved dog.

The Late Show starts with two blazing hours of a Ballard work shift. She begins by answering an elderly woman’s complaint about credit card fraud. Then she learns of a cross-dresser who’s been savagely attacked. As usual, Connelly relies on his inside-baseball knowledge about police attitudes. "Drag queens, cross-dressers and transgenders were all generally referred to as dragons in vice," he writes."

No distinctions were made. It wasn’t nice but it was accepted. Ballard had spent two years on a decoy team in the unit herself. She knew the turf and she knew the slang. It would never go away, no matter how many hours of sensitivity training cops were subjected to."

Then, during the same night, there are "four on the floor in a club on Sunset" — four shooting victims in one booth, and a waitress near the back exit who turns out to be a fifth. This club, the Dancers, takes its name from another in Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, and its drinks are named for Los Angeles literary titles.

Connelly doesn’t give Ballard Harry Bosch’s taste for jazz, but he laces the book with noir references. There’s a character who favours brass knuckles that say 'Good' and 'Evil', à la Robert Mitchum’s 'Love' and 'Hate' tattoos in the film The Night of the Hunter.

By the end of a highly populated book that Connelly says was tough to edit, Ballard will get to the bottom of every aspect of several crimes. And she’ll do a lot more. Smart and fierce, she never stops working, to the point of making Bosch look like a slouch. She’s also steamy enough to weaponise seduction if it will help her, and absolutely blunt when she speaks her mind. When a colleague who betrayed her tries to apologise, she responds with an unforgiving tongue-lashing.

The pacing of Ballard’s debut story is breathless. Unless she’s in the water, she never has a peaceful moment: there’s always a lead to follow, a house to scope out, a late-night call to make. One thing she loves about the night shift is feeling entitled to assume a combat stance at 3 am, scare some miscreant out of bed and shout: "Police! Let me see your hands!"

The novel moves so quickly, racking up so many witnesses and suspects, that it ought to be hard to follow. But Connelly expertly hides a trail of breadcrumbs that leads straight to the denouement, with so much else going on that it’s impossible to see where he’s heading.