What do you do when you are a very established author trying to start a new series with a new character? Naturally, you write a book that has the new character as well as your well-known battle worn character. In the case of Michael Connelly’s Dark Sacred Night, the new character is graveyard shift Los Angeles Police Department detective Renée Ballard. To be fair, she did appear on her own in The Late Show, Connelly’s first novel with her as the main character, which was a very solid novel. Here, she is paired up with semi-retired LAPD detective Harry Bosch. Michael Connelly introduced Bosch way back in 1992 in The Black Echo, and he has appeared in close to two dozen novels.
Ballard runs into Bosch when she sees him digging around in some old police files at LAPD headquarters. She is initially puzzled as to what he is doing and how he got into the file cabinet, but she becomes intrigued when she discovers that the file he was looking at was a cold case for a murdered runaway teen. Ballard and Bosch start working together, and she quickly grows to appreciate his commitment to solving the case, even if he does not do it by the book. She does not always do things by the book either, particularly during a hair-raising scene toward the conclusion of Dark Sacred Night.
The two detectives get involved in several other cases during the course of the book. One of the more interesting is a gang murder case involving Bosch in which little goes as planned for him and the other police officers involved. Among other side cases, Ballard investigates a very odd theft (or is it?) of some Andy Warhol paintings. Connelly does a nice job working these cases in without getting too far away from the murdered runaway case that brings Ballard and Bosch together. He also seamlessly brings the two together. What could have seemed like a bad TV show crossover seems like a natural meeting of two police detectives who believe in doing the right thing, even if it involves working a case on their own time.
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