THE DARK HOURS by Michael Connelly

 Finished Tu 4/30/24

This is a paperback that Janny loaned to me. It's very late in the Bosch series and features Renee Ballard.

The title refers to 'the night shift'. Renee Ballard likes to work without a lot of people and 'late nights' are just fine.

TWO CASES:

1) A man is shot during a New Years celebration. Because so many people fire guns into the air, at first it was thought to be an accident. It was really one of his partners who wanted to take over the business. It seemed that this was an 'inner-city' business and a group of white dentists wanted the enterprise.

2) Midnight Men rapists- A team of rapists are preying on women. The tip-off is that they disable the street lights in front of the victims' homes. Renee learns that these men are contacted on 'the dark web'.

From the book's page at Kirkus Reviews:

"Meet today’s LAPD, with both good and bad apples reduced to reacting to crimes defensively instead of trying to prevent them, unless of course they’re willing to break the rules.

New Year’s Eve 2020 finds Detective Renée Ballard, survivor of rape and Covid-19, partnered with Detective Lisa Moore, of Hollywood’s Sexual Assault Unit, in search of leads on the Midnight Men, a tag team of rapists who assaulted women on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve without leaving any forensic evidence behind. The pair are called to the scene of a shooting that would have gone to West Bureau Homicide if the unit weren’t already stretched to the limit, a case that should be handed over to West Bureau ASAP. But Ballard gets her teeth into the murder of body shop owner Javier Raffa, who reportedly bought his way out of the gang Las Palmas. The news that Raffa’s been shot by the same weapon that killed rapper Albert Lee 10 years ago sends Ballard once more to Harry Bosch, the poster boy for retirements that drive the LAPD crazy. Both victims had taken on silent partners in order to liquidate their debts, and there’s every indication that the partners were linked. That’s enough for Ballard and Bosch to launch a shadow investigation even as Ballard, abandoned by Moore, who’s flown the coop for the weekend, works feverishly to identify the Midnight Men on her own. As usual in this stellar series, the path to the last act is paved with false leads, interdepartmental squabbles, and personal betrayals, and the structure sometimes sways in the breeze. But no one who follows Ballard and Bosch to the end will be disappointed.

A bracing test of the maxim that “the department always comes first. The department always wins.”