Michael Connelly delivers again with a punchy police procedural and a brand new character.

Title:             The Late Show

Genre:          Crime Fiction

Author:        Michael Connelly

Published 2017 “The Late Show” introduces a new Connelly character, following on from his highly successful Harry Bosch (detective) and Mickey Haller (lawyer) series of books.

Meet LAPD Detective Renée Ballard, modern cop surfer girl of indeterminate age, and her dog, Lola. Ballard is a fourteen year veteran who’s been shunted onto the late shift – eleven to seven – because of calling out a senior officer for sexual assault and then not getting any back-up from her erstwhile partner. Now she’s on the graveyard shift for people who’ve offended the powers that be, partnered with “Jenks”, a 25 year veteran who just wants to be home by dawn to see the sun rise with his cancer-stricken wife. Ballard’s frustrated because she doesn’t get to keep cases, just attend and then hand them on to the morning shift.

First up Ballard and Jenks get called out to what looks like a burglary; then there’s a badly beaten and dumped transgender victim (along with burst implants!), before they get pulled into a 5 victim shooting at a club on Sunset, and then Connelly’s off at 200 miles an hour, doing what he probably does best in the world right now, writing highly exciting and engaging prose that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and wont let you go. And for the first 200 pages he does just that, but like all thrillers there is a slight slacking of the pace as we go through the centre point, but then he’s into it again, putting Ballard in extreme jeopardy as he ratchets up the suspense and tension.

Connelly knows his stuff, and this is a real police procedural right down to how they generate the numbers for bagging and logging evidence.

Connelly was of course a crime reporter for the LA Times before becoming a novelist and he uses his knowledge of journalism to good effect later in the story when there’s a negative leak about Ballard in the press from inside the department and she goes after the leaker

Here is a quote that gives us a flavour of Ballard’s backstory: “She had a degree in journalism from the university of Hawaii and while she had not lasted long as a reporter, the training and experience had given her skills that helped immeasurably with this side of policework. She reacted well to deadline pressure and she could clearly conceptualise her crime reports and case summaries before writing them. She wrote short clear sentences that gave momentum to the narrative of the investigation.” (my italics added). I figure Connelly could almost have been thinking about himself when he wrote this!

Any negatives? Not really, although I did find the book a tad mechanical and his grasp of the female sensibility slightly, perhaps understandably, less effective than when he writes men, but this is after all only the first glimpse of a new character and I guess he will have plenty of time to develop her in subsequent books, as he did so successfully with Bosch and Haller.

A top notch crime thriller and an exciting read that I don’t think will disappoint existing Connelly fans, and may bring him in some new ones.