Reviews for The Late Show

by Michael Connelly

Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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.


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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.


Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

*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