The Late Show

I picked this up because I wanted to know why Connelly gave Harry Bosch a partner in the later books, and because a friend who works nights said the title described her shift exactly. The Late Show came out in July 2017, 405 pages from Little, Brown and Company, and it is the first novel about Renée Ballard. Bosch does not appear. That surprised me. The book is set in his Los Angeles, inside the same department, but Ballard has to earn her own reading space, and Connelly makes her do it the hard way.

The first thing that struck me was how tired everyone is. Not sleepy. Tired in the way that shows up in the shoulders. Ballard works the eleven to seven shift in Hollywood Division, the "late show," and her job is to catch the first hours of a case and then hand it to the day shift at dawn. She writes the preliminary reports. Someone else gets the arrest and the press conference. Jenkins, her partner, has a wife at home and a simple philosophy about the arrangement: take the report, go home, stay sane. Ballard cannot do that. That difference between them is the engine of the book.

The shift nobody wants

Ballard did not choose the night shift. She was in Robbery-Homicide, the elite unit, and she filed a sexual harassment complaint against her supervisor, Lieutenant Robert Olivas. Her partner at the time, Ken Chastain, did not back her up. The complaint failed. Olivas stayed. Chastain stayed. Ballard got Hollywood at night, which is where the department puts detectives it wants to forget. It is a slow professional burial, and everyone knows it.

Connelly gives her a life that fits the hours. She has no apartment. She keeps a van, sleeps in a tent on Venice Beach during the day, and paddles out on a board most mornings. Her dog, Lola, goes with her. Her grandmother Tutu lives in Ventura, and Ballard visits when she can. She grew up on Maui. Her father, a California surfer, drowned; her Hawaiian mother is not part of her life. None of this is dumped in one sad chapter. It comes out in pieces, usually when Ballard is too tired to guard it, and that restraint is one of the best things in the book.

I liked her routine more than I expected. A detective who sleeps in a tent sounds like a cute quirk. Here it reads like a practical decision by someone who does not want to go home to an empty place, and the beach is where she can park, sleep, and get in the water before the next shift.

Two cases and a third

The book opens with a burglary that looks like nothing. An elderly woman named Leslie Anne Lantana has had her wallet taken. Ballard takes the report, calls the credit card company, and gets stuck in the usual maze. The fraud department is overseas, the hold times are long, and the case is already dying. She works it anyway. That small case returns late, mostly to show her refusal to let go of anything.

Then the night splits open. Ballard and Jenkins are called to Hollywood Presbyterian, where a woman has been dumped in a parking lot after a beating. She was hit with brass knuckles and bitten. Before she loses consciousness she says her name might be Ramona and that she was attacked at "the upside-down house." Ballard learns she is Ramona Ramone, a transgender sex worker born Ramón Gutierrez. The injuries are severe. She is comatose, and the odds of her waking up are not good.

At the same time comes the call about a shooting at the Dancers, a club on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Jenkins goes to the club. Ballard stays at the hospital with the fifth victim, a cocktail waitress named Cynthia Haddel, who is called Cindy. Ballard watches her die. She takes a small key on a string from around Haddel's neck. At the club she uses it to open Haddel's locker and finds a vial of drugs. Haddel was selling to patrons. That detail matters later because it turns a random victim into a person with a secret.

The club scene is the best set piece in the first half. The Dancers is named after a club in The Long Goodbye, and its cocktail menu is full of L.A. literary jokes. Connelly does not linger on the joke. He uses it to make the place feel real before he fills it with bodies. Three men were killed in a booth, then a bouncer, then Haddel on the way out. Five dead. The shooter walked.

Ballard catches a glimpse of Chastain at the scene, bagging a small black object from the floor. She does not know what it is. Neither did I, and Connelly is fair about it: the object is mentioned once, plainly, and then buried under procedure.

Olivas takes over the shooting. He is the same man Ballard accused, and he treats her with the polished contempt of someone who has already won. He assigns her to process Haddel's belongings and notify the family. He calls Haddel a peripheral victim, collateral damage. Ballard does the notification anyway. She uses Haddel's thumb to unlock her phone and calls her parents. That scene is short and awful in the right way. Then Chastain shows up to take custody of a witness and tries to apologize for not supporting her two years earlier. Ballard tells him it is too late. She is not cruel about it. She is just done.

The upside-down house

Ballard keeps the Ramona case alive on her own time. She searches old vice files and finds Thomas Trent, a car salesman who was arrested years earlier with brass knuckles inscribed with the words GOOD and EVIL. Trent's house sits on a hillside and is built on a slope, so the rooms are stacked in a way that could be called upside down. The description matches what Ramona said.

She does not storm the place. She goes to the Acura dealership where Trent works and poses as a buyer. During the test drive he makes transphobic remarks and she sees fresh bruises on his knuckles. Later she stages a fake prowler call so she can walk around his property and look in the windows. She sees a bare room at the lowest level. By then I was sold on Ballard as a detective. She is patient in the unglamorous way, sitting in a car and waiting for a man to say something stupid.

The case gets darker. Ramona had been missing for more than a week before she was dumped. She was held, beaten, and bitten. Trent's ex-wife, Beatrice Beaupre, is a porn director who left him because of his violent fantasies. She confirms that he called the house the upside-down house and collected the GOOD and EVIL knuckles. She gives Ballard a key. The interview is one of the few places where Connelly lets a minor character be more than a source. Beaupre is tired, matter-of-fact, and not surprised, and that reaction says more about Trent than a paragraph of explanation.

The burglary resolves too: the credit card company gives up a shipping address, and Ballard arrests Christopher Nettles, a parolee with a gun and stolen packages, at a motel. It is a clean, small win, and the book needs it.

The partner who didn't have her back

On Saturday morning, Chastain is found shot to death in his garage. Execution style. His service weapon is missing. Ballard goes to the scene and Olivas orders her away. That is where the book turns. Up to then it has been about a detective who will not let go of two cases. Now it is about a detective who thinks the department is covering up the murder of her former partner.

The official theory takes shape without her. Chastain was the Dancers shooter, the theory goes, and he was killed in a mob hit. The ballistics are made to fit. The missing gun helps. Ballard does not buy it. She gets into Chastain's computer files and finds that the three men killed in the booth knew each other from jail. One of them, Gordon Fabian, had a lawyer named Dean Towson. The autopsy notes mention a battery burn on Fabian, which suggests he was wearing a wire. Towson confirms that Fabian was trying to trade information about a corrupt cop to the federal authorities.

That is the shape of the thing: a police officer was the shooter, and Fabian was about to sell him. Ballard also learns that a witness named Zander Speights had a friend, Matthew "Metro" Robison, who called Chastain on Friday and then disappeared. Metro is the loose thread. If he is alive, he can identify the shooter. If he is dead, the frame around Chastain gets tighter.

Carr comes to her. Detective Rogers Carr, a member of the task force, shows up at her tent on Venice Beach to ask about her theory. He tells her it is ridiculous. She tells him about Metro's phone and the possibility that the killer has it. Carr says he will look into it. The scene works because Ballard is not sure, and neither was I.

The basement in Ventura

The Trent case and the Chastain case collide in the worst way. Trent runs the plates on Ballard's van, or so she suspects, and realizes she is a cop. She drives to Ventura to see Tutu. He is waiting. He catches her from behind, puts her in a choke hold, and she wakes up naked and bound with zip ties to a chair in the lowest room of his house. The room is bare, the way she saw it from outside.

What follows is the hardest section to read. Trent tells her what he plans to do. He has her key, the one Beaupre gave her. He leaves to get Beaupre, and he doses Ballard with ketamine so she will stay put. She wakes before he returns. Her escape is not an action-movie trick. She works the zip tie against the chair, using friction to heat and stretch the plastic until she can get a hand free. It is slow and desperate. By the time Trent comes back with an unconscious Beaupre, Ballard is ready. She ambushes him. They fight. She kills him with a splintered piece of the chair leg and calls 911.

A heroine who kills a man in a basement will be investigated, and Connelly does not skip that. The Force Investigation Division takes over, led by Lieutenant Joseph Feltzer. A negative story appears in the Los Angeles Times suggesting the department is building a case against Ballard. She and Towson, the lawyer, find out that Feltzer is the source of the leak. They record him meeting the reporter and use the video to pressure him into a quick finding that the killing was within policy. It is a neat bit of pressure, and it strains belief a little.

A holster cap and a thumbprint

The last movement is the one that made the book for me. Ballard finds that Haddel's evidence bag has been opened and resealed. Inside is a business card with the name Eric Higgs, VMD. Higgs is a professor who works with vacuum metal deposition, a forensic technique that lifts prints normal powder cannot. Chastain had mailed him a small cap from a Lawmaster shoulder holster and a note telling him to trust Ballard. Higgs lifts a thumbprint from the cap.

The print belongs to Rogers Carr. The same Carr who came to her tent and told her she was wrong. The same Carr who sat on the task force and knew every move the investigation made. Ballard and Olivas set a trap for him at the Metropolitan Detention Center. Carr is arrested. Ballistics confirm that his weapons were used in the Dancers shooting and in Chastain's murder.

The motive is small and ugly in the way real corruption usually is. Carr was in the booth that night. Fabian was wearing a wire and planning to give him up. Carr shot the men at the table, then the bouncer and Haddel on his way out. When Metro saw Carr on television and recognized him, Metro called Chastain. Carr, monitoring the case, realized Chastain was closing in, so he killed him and tried to make it look like Chastain was the shooter. Metro was not dead. Ballard finds him at the Mark Twain hotel, a safe house she and Chastain used when they were partners, and brings him out alive.

Olivas offers her a way back to Robbery-Homicide. She says no. That refusal is the cleanest character beat in the book. She could have taken the promotion and the day shift and the career that was stolen from her. She does not want it from him. She stays on the late show, which is where she can still do the work.

What drags, and who should skip it

The first hundred and fifty pages are a ride-along. That is the point, and it is also the problem. Connelly wants us to feel the rhythm of the night shift, the report writing, the handoffs, the way a case dies at sunrise. Some readers will love that texture. Others will wonder when the story starts. If you need a body in the first chapter and a chase by the third, this will feel slow.

The two main cases also compete for attention. Ramona is the more personal and disturbing case; the Dancers shooting is the bigger, more public one. For long stretches they take turns, and neither gets the sustained pressure of a single-case novel. The book is strongest when the cases touch, which they do late.

The Trent material is ugly. That is deliberate, and Connelly does not linger for spectacle, but the basement chapters are hard going. The resolution of the FID leak is also too easy. A secret recording solves a department scandal in a few pages, and after the careful procedural work earlier, it feels like a shortcut. Jenkins remains a little thin. He is the partner with a wife and a reasonable attitude, and the book never gives him a scene that is truly his.

Ballard herself is almost too good at times. She outthinks the task force, survives a kidnapping, and solves two cases on her own time. Connelly gives her mistakes, but they are the mistakes of a competent person taking risks, not the mistakes of a fool. Readers who prefer their detectives broken may find her too together; readers who wanted a Connelly heroine with her own center of gravity will not mind.

This is not the book to start with if you want Harry Bosch. Bosch is absent, and the tone is cooler. It is the right book if you want a police procedural about a woman who refuses to be buried by her department. The last hundred pages move fast, and the final image of Ballard back on the water, with Lola on the beach and Chastain's last act finally understood, earns the next book. I finished it and ordered Dark Sacred Night the same week.