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Summary
Summary
In this first installment of the Renée Ballard series, #1 bestselling author Michael Connelly introduces a "complicated and driven" young detective fighting to prove herself on the LAPD's toughest beat ( The New York Times ).
Renee Ballard works the midnight shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing few, as each morning she turns everything over to the daytime units. It's a frustrating job for a once up-and-coming detective, but it's no accident. She's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.
But one night Ballard catches two assignments she doesn't want to part with. First, a prostitute is brutally beaten and left for dead in a parking lot. All signs point to a crime of premeditation, not passion, by someone with big evil on his mind. Then she sees a young waitress breathe her last after being caught up in a nightclub shooting. Though dubbed a peripheral victim, the waitress buys Ballard a way in, and this time she is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her partner's wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night.
As the investigations intertwine, Ballard is forced to face her own demons and confront a danger she could never have imagined. To find justice for these victims who can't speak for themselves, she must put not only her career but her life on the line.
Propulsive as a jolt of adrenaline and featuring a bold and defiant new heroine, The Late Show is yet more proof that Michael Connelly is "a master of the genre" ( Washington Post ).
Author Notes
Michael Connelly was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 21, 1956. He graduated from the University of Florida in 1980 where he majored in journalism and minored in creative writing. After graduation, he worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, specializing in the crime beat. In 1986, he interviewed survivors of a plane crash with two other reporters and the magazine story subsequently written on the crash was on the short list for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. This story led to a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. After three years there, he began writing his first novel.
His first novel, The Black Echo, was published in 1992 and won the Edgar Award for best first novel. He is the author of the Harry Bosch series, the Jack McEvoy series, and the Mickey Haller series. He has won numerous awards including the Anthony Award, Macavity Award, Shamus Award, Dilys Award, Nero Award, Barry Award, Ridley Award, Maltese Falcon Award (Japan), .38 Caliber Award (France), Grand Prix Award (France), Premio Bancarella Award (Italy), and the Pepe Carvalho Award (Spain).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The title of this excellent series launch from bestseller Connelly (The Wrong Side of Goodbye and 20 other Harry Bosch novels) refers to the midnight shift at LAPD's Hollywood Division. Det. Renée Ballard has landed there in retribution for filing sexual harassment charges against her former boss, Lt. Robert Olivas. Two major crimes soon concern Ballard: the vicious beating of a woman, who says she was assaulted in the "upside-down house" but passes out before she can explain, and a nightclub shooting that kills five people. Though most "late show" cops hand off cases to their day shift counterparts, Ballard personally investigates the assault (with official approval) and the nightclub shooting (without). Olivas, who's leading the latter investigation, wants her nowhere near the case. What follows is classic Connelly: a master class of LAPD internal politics and culture, good old-fashioned detective work, and state-of-the-art forensic science-plus a protagonist who's smart, relentless, and reflective. Talking about the perpetrator of the assault, Ballard says, "This is big evil out there." That's Connelly's great theme, and, once again, he delivers. Agent: Philip Spitzer, Philip G. Spitzer Literary. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Connelly has been doing much more with his female characters lately: in The Burning Room (2014), his longtime series lead, Harry Bosch, shared screen time with rookie detective Lucia Soto, who emerged as a fully fleshed out, multidimensional character, and in The Wrong Side of Goodbye (2016), Bosch is paired with Bella Lourdes, another young detective who profits from Harry's mentoring while showing she's more than capable of stealing a scene from the veteran. Now, perhaps inevitably, Connelly goes a step further: debuting a new series starring a female detective, Renée Ballard, who has been exiled to the night shift after unsuccessfully challenging the LAPD's old-boy network by bringing sexual-harassment charges against her boss. Chafing at the lot of the late show detective, who must launch investigations only to turn them over to the day shift when morning comes, Renée continues to investigate, off the books, two crimes that land on her plate: the beating of a prostitute and the murder of a cocktail waitress. Connelly's special genius has always been his ability to build character like the most literary of novelists while attending to the procedural details of a police investigation with all the focus of anEd McBain. He does both here, showing us Renée on her surfboard, working out her Bosch-like demons, but also grinding through the minutiae of the case until she achieves that Holy Grail of detective work, that moment of knowing she has her man. Many established crime writers James Lee Burke, Ian Rankin, Randy Wayne White have launched new series as their signature heroes age, but few have done it as successfully as Connelly. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The success of Amazon's Bosch TV show has enlarged Connelly's already enormous fan base, making this the perfect moment to launch a new print series.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Honestly, how hard can it be to write a likable hooker? (Give her a brutish ex-husband, have some thug hold her for ransom, and take her shopping on Rodeo Drive.) But it takes real talent to write a coyote with personality. Petty is up in the Hollywood Hills, waiting for a ride, when he sees two coyotes trotting down the middle of the road, "one of them shooting him a hateful yellow glare" as it ambles past. To add insult to injury, it smirks at him when he tries to shoo it away. Even inanimate objects come to life in Lange's world: "Tumbleweeds bounded across the road, flashing in the headlights like fleeing animals." The caper plot is tidier (and more violent) than Lange's usual free-form efforts, with a solid back story about Army buddies conniving to retrieve the cash they made from stolen goods ("everything from computers and printers to microwaves and washing machines") in Afghanistan. The book is most fun, though, when it focuses on Petty's clever ruses to separate the rubes from their life's savings. Through trial and error, the con man has learned that a yellow safety vest, a baseball cap and a clipboard constitute an all-purpose disguise for real estate scams. And the telephone is his friend when he just wants to rustle up a few bucks for breakfast. Lange's bread and butter are his quick studies of colorful characters, many of whom die here in unpleasant ways. So it's only fitting when those who are still alive at the end raise their glasses on New Year's Eve in a toast "to the lucky and the unlucky, the swindlers and the swindled, the living and the dead." ?? ace atkins and his devoted readers, Tibbehah County, Miss., is no less real than Yoknapatawpha County was to Laulkner and his followers. So the first thing you do with THE FALLEN (Putnam, $27) is take a quick head count to make sure all your favorite characters are still standing. Sheriff Quinn Colson is back in office and oblivious to the adulation of his deputy, Lillie Virgil. Dances are still held at Sammy Hagar's Red Rocker Bar and Grill, gossip still traded at the Lillin' Station diner. And fear not, Lannie Hathcock is still doing land-office business at Vienna's Place (formerly known as the Booby Trap and still the "best strip club south of Memphis"), where happy hour dances are still a reasonable $20 per lap. Tibbehah has been an outlaw haven since bootlegging days, so it's a professional insult when out-of-town robbers steal $192,000 from the Pirst National Bank. But even that major crime is overshadowed when two local girls go missing and everyone fears the worst. What Atkins understands is that regional mysteries can go only so far when updating local crime patterns. It's O.K. to rob the town bank, but you can't burn it to the ground. MEDIEVAL VENICE SPREADS out her treasures for religious pilgrims in S. D. Sykes's CITY OF MASKS (Pegasus Crime, $25.95) - not the aesthetic riches of La Serenissima or the material wealth of her Doges, but the kind of treasure that buys a place in the afterlife. If they hustle, pilgrims can amass heaps of indulgences by praying at iconic shrines containing "the feet of Mary the Egyptian, the ear of St. Paul the Apostle and the molar of Goliath." Oswald de Lacy, Lord Somershill of Kent and the amiable amateur sleuth in this series, has not come to the city for the shrines. De Lacy is a gambler, and Venice has some of the most infamous dens of iniquity in Europe. But once he's lost his purse, there's no sport left but to solve the murder of Enrico Bearpark, grandson of a great Venice patriarch who suspects the boy was killed by his male lover. "A murderer will hang in this city," the old man informs de Lacy, "but a sodomite is always burned." Needless to say, this investigation is an extremely sensitive one, even for a dab hand like de Lacy. Michael connelly introduces a new sleuth in the late show (Little, Brown, $28), a detective named Renée Ballard who can almost, if not quite, lift her own weight among the tough guys in the Los Angeles Police Department. Most nights are slow on the late shift, with Ballard looking for wandering Alzheimer's patients and signing off on suicides. But this new cop has a personal mission to find her late partner's killer without undermining the last case they worked together, one that she rightly calls "big evil." Worse, she's being pilloried in the press, thanks to false information being leaked by someone at her own station. There's nothing wrong with Ballard's case or her serious work habits. It's just that she doesn't seem to be having as much fun as all the guys. ? Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Guardian Review
Karin Slaughter's books have been accused of being too dark and violent; her formidable new novel, The Good Daughter (HarperCollins, [pound]20), dials those very qualities up a notch or two. Slaughter has long demonstrated a fascination with the troubling dynamics of domesticity. Here, Samantha and Charlotte Quinn have their everyday lives in a small US town torn apart by an act of violence in their family home: their mother dies, followed by the emotional collapse of the sisters' attorney father. Three decades later, Charlotte, now practising law, appears to have exorcised these events. But another disturbing incident opens up a particularly nasty can of worms that will bring the past devastatingly into the present. Characterisation is drawn in broad brush strokes, but with a core of psychological truth that underpins the tense narrative. After creating two of the most distinctive heroes in thriller fiction -- abrasive LA cop Harry Bosch and low-rent lawyer Mickey Haller -- you might think that Michael Connelly would be justified in resting on his laurels. But the author is clearly aiming to establish a trinity of crime fiction protagonists. In The Late Show (Orion, [pound]19.99), we are introduced to under-a-cloud detective Renee Ballard, who shows every sign of the durability of her male confreres. After filing sexual harassment charges against her ex-boss, Ballard has been ignominiously consigned to the midnight shift of the LAPD's Hollywood division (the eponymous "late show"). Part of her soft punishment is that she is obliged to hand over to the day shift any challenging cases that come her way. But after the savage beating of a woman and a nightclub massacre that leaves five dead, Ballard breaks the rules by refusing to pass over these cases; her ex-boss is soon an implacable opponent. Although the usual Connelly fingerprints are in evidence here -- a gritty picture of US detective work and the trenchant office politics of the LAPD -- the real achievement is the creation of his tenacious heroine, Ballard. With admirable economy, what we learn about her comes solely from watching how she does her job; the character insights accrue along the way. The end of the cold war had a deleterious effect on the espionage novel, with even such titans as Le Carre cast adrift for a while. But proof that the genre is flourishing anew in the 21st century comes with My Name Is Nobody by Matthew Richardson (Michael Joseph, [pound]12.99), which is good enough for us to forgive the much-used title and the fact that Richardson is a Westminster political speechwriter. In bad odour with his spymaster bosses, Solomon Vine is struggling to deal with the abduction of the Istanbul head of station following a terrorist interrogation, and (as is customary for the genre) nobody he encounters can be trusted. Richardson is less concerned with the subtler characterisation that distinguishes the more ambitious offerings in the spy genre, but his plotting has an old-school, Swiss-clock precision that keeps the reader pleasurably engaged. Journalist Kate Waters spots a story when the bones of a child are discovered during a construction project. Publisher Emma Simmonds has also noted the discovery, but is anxious to hide its personal significance from her husband. And Angela Irving is a nurse who persuades herself that the skeleton is that of her daughter, stolen from a maternity ward in 1970 -- a crime for which she has been in the frame. A multi--stranded approach is adopted in Fiona Barton's successor to The Widow, The Child (Bantam, [pound]12.99), which shares the large cast and andante tempo of Paula Hawkins's recent Into the Water. Barton marshals these elements with rigour; perhaps, though, she might try something different next time from the missing child scenario of her first two novels. French crime maestro Pierre Lemaitre continues his upward movement in Three Days and a Life (MacLehose, [pound]14.99, trans. Frank Wynne), with a 12-year-old boy set on a grim trajectory following the disappearance of another child. This is typically astringent and accomplished fare -- as is Christopher Bollen's lengthy and atmospheric The Destroyers (Scribner, [pound]14.99). The hapless Ian Bledsoe's trip to a Greek island to inveigle money from childhood friend Charlie takes him into very dangerous waters when Charlie disappears. As with Lemaitre, this is literary crime writing of some distinction: a heady melange of Aldous Huxley and Robert Goddard. - Barry Forshaw.
Kirkus Review
The 30th novel by the creator of Harry Bosch (The Wrong Side of Goodbye, 2016, etc.) and the Lincoln Lawyer (The Gods of Guilt, 2013, etc.) introduces an LAPD detective fighting doggedly for justice for herself and a wide array of victims.Ever since her partner, Detective Ken Chastain, failed to back up her sexual harassment claim against Lt. Robert Olivas, her supervisor at the Robbery Homicide Division, Rene Ballard has been banished to the midnight shiftthe late show. She's kept her chin down and worked her cases, most of which are routinely passed on to the day shifts, without complaints or recriminations. But that all ends the night she and Detective John Jenkins, the partner who's running on empty, are called to The Dancers, a nightclub where five people have been shot dead. Three of thema bookie, a drug dealer, and a rumored mob enforcerare no great loss, but Ballard can't forget Cynthia Haddel, the young woman serving drinks while she waited for her acting career to take off. The case naturally falls to Olivas, who humiliatingly shunts Ballard aside. But she persists in following leads during her time off even though she'd already caught another case earlier the same night, the brutal assault on Ramona Ramone, ne Ramn Gutierrez, a trans hooker beaten nearly to death who mumbles something about "the upside-down house" before lapsing into a coma. Despite, or because of, the flak she gets from across the LAPD, Ballard soldiers on, horrified but energized when Chastain is gunned down only a few hours after she tells him off for the way he let her down two years ago. She'll run into layers of interference, get kidnapped herself, expose a leak in the department, kill a man, and find some wholly unexpected allies before she claps the cuffs on the killer in a richly satisfying conclusion. More perhaps than any of Connelly's much-honored other titles, this one reveals why his procedures are the most soulful in the business: because he finds the soul in the smallest procedural details, faithfully executed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
LAPD officer Renée Ballard was relegated to the "late show," the midnight to 8 a.m. street patrol, after her allegation of sexual harassment against her supervisor Lieutenant Olivas was dismissed. On duty one night, she and her partner respond to a robbery and are directed to two crime scenes: the brutal beating of a transgender prostitute and a multiple shooting. Rather than pass off the robbery to the detective squad, Ballard volunteers to investigate. She also probes the other incidents on the sly-in the case of the shooting, against Olivas's direct order. Her intuition tells her the shooter was a police officer, namely her boss. This new police procedural series' lackluster entry by the creator of the Harry Bosch series (The Wrong Side of Goodbye) pits the driven Ballard against an increasingly hostile Olivas. While the action builds in the second half, it is halfhearted, and the quick and tidy solutions to the robbery and beating are anticlimactic. An early reference to Bosch is gratuitous. Verdict Fans will clamor for Connelly's new protagonist, who is a female Bosch, caring and driven to finding the truth at all costs, but she will need more grit to survive.-Edward Goldberg, Syosset P.L., NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.