In his 36th novel, The Dark Hours, Michael Connelly brings back two of his recurring characters, LAPD homicide detectives Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch, who reunite after an apparently stray bullet kills a former gang member (now the owner of an auto shop) in Hollywood on New Year’s Eve. Ballard and Bosch have worked together in two previous novels; both are outsiders among their colleagues and cynical about department politics. Here, however, all that is made more complex by the COVID-19 pandemic and by the aftermath of the social justice movement provoked by the police killing of George Floyd. What, Connelly means to ask us, is the role of the police procedural in a society where police may not be trusted? The result is a superb reimagining of the form.
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