Dark Sacred Night, by Michael Connelly

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A Ballard and Bosch novel with a lot of focus on LAPD Det. Renée Ballard, who works the night shift referred to as The Late Show. Ballard’s focus on her work is much like Bosch’s with high intensity. She finds Bosch looking through some old case files late one night with no one’s permission, and then she learns he is a retired LAPD working cold cases for the San Fernando PD. When he leaves, she looks at the file detailing the unsolved 2009 murder of Daisy Clayton, a 15-year-old runaway.

Ballard wants in on the cold case and begins working with Bosch. An investigation into another hard case by Bosch that involves killing a 52-year-old gang leader has put the detective marked to be killed by the violent gang Varrio San Fer 13. Bosch plays the double role of being the hunter and the hunted.

Bosch and Ballard working together, bring a new dimension to the drama and well-plotted crime investigations of Michael Connelly.

Quotes

“For every noble movement or advancement in the human endeavor across time, there were always betrayers who set everything a step back.”

“Neither spoke, neither made a sound except for the deep exhalation of breath. First, he felt her hips shudder, and soon after, he desperately reached up and pulled her into an embrace as his own body created that one moment that takes all other moments away—all fear, all sadness—and leaves just joy. Just hope. Sometimes love.”

“There was something deeply affecting about that. Something unfair went beyond the general unfairness of death at the hands of another. She wondered how men would live if they knew that their size and nature made them vulnerable to the opposite sex in every moment of their lives.”