“Renee Ballard works the LAPD late shift in Hollywood after being banished from the elite Robbery-Homicide Division.”
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The Late Show is Michael Connelly's 2017 standalone-launching-a-series, the first Renee Ballard novel and the book that introduced one of the strongest new Connelly protagonists since Harry Bosch. Ballard, a former Robbery-Homicide detective, has been banished to the Hollywood Division's late shift after filing a sexual harassment complaint that her department mishandled. The late shift works the cases that come in between midnight and dawn and hands them off to the day-shift detectives at sunrise. Ballard does not work that way; she follows her cases, even when the day shift wants them.
Connelly's procedural method (the small detail, the careful evidence chain, the patient walk through the case) is well-suited to Ballard's character. The two parallel cases she pursues across the novel (a trans sex-worker assault and a Hollywood nightclub mass shooting) are both fully realized procedural narratives in their own right, and the way Connelly braids them is one of the cleaner structural achievements in his catalog. The Hollywood Boulevard setting is rendered with the kind of local specificity Connelly brings to L. A. across his series. Ballard herself is a more compelling new protagonist than most veteran writers create at midcareer.
Recommended for fans of the Harry Bosch novels who want a new entry point into the Connelly universe, for readers of contemporary procedural fiction (Karin Slaughter's Will Trent, Tana French's Murder Squad), and for anyone looking for books like The Late Show in the female-detective-late-shift subgenre. The 2022 Ballard novel Desert Star (with Bosch) is the natural next read. Four solid stars.
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