The Late Show by Michael Connelly.
New character for Connelly - Renée Ballard, an LAPD detective who lives out of her van. She has been exiled to "the late show", the graveyard shift, after a complaint about a superior officer's sexual harrassment fell through. Ballard spends her nights catching cases that she never closed because in the morning she has to turn them over to the other detectives. While opening the case of a transsexual prostitute beaten to within an inch of her life, Ballard is pulled into the periphery of a mass shooting at a nightclub.
It's standard Connelly fare so far. He's at his best when he's balancing several narrative threads, a technique that he's perfected for some time. But I'm not completely sold on Renée Ballard - she feels like a solution to the Harry Bosch problem: Bosch has been fired, re-hired, semi-retired, reinstated and transferred so many times that there's not much more that can be done. The Wrong Side of Goodbye effectively moved him out of the city, but it's obvious that Connelly still wants to write stories in Los Angeles. Ballard seems to be a way around that without having to invent an excuse to bring Bosch back. She feels like one of his regular partners, but I don't see why an established character like Talisa Soto or Kiz Rider wouldn't work. But I do find her introduction interesting since Connelly has another Bosch novel coming out later this year.
