"The Waiting" Introduces New Characters and Solves Historic Murders
I read the Michael Connelly’s most recent book “The Waiting”
over the last week.
It features Renee Ballard, the surfer detective with an unfinished
backstory about her life in Hawaii. This is the 6th addition with this
character if my counting is right. If you’re new to the series, Renee was a
tough detective that worked the overnight shift until she came across Harry Bosch
while researching a case. In the first book she sued a high ranking official
for sexual harassment. Her relationship with the department is frosty to say
the least. Harry’s primary role in these new books is researcher and undercover investigator.
He knows a lot of old cop tricks and finds a way to keep her away from any departmental
blowback. Not to mention, showing her how to maneuver around legal roadblocks.
They’ve both settled into a comfortable arrangement. Ballard
heads up the Open Unsolved Unit and uses Bosch when she thinks the department
may not approve of her decisions. Think of the Open Unsolved Unit as a library
of cold case files that Renee’s crew works from. She has a handful of volunteers
that dig up old addresses and social security numbers to connect murderers to deaths. “The Waiting” gets its name from the Tom Petty song of the same title.
As the lyric goes, “The waiting is the hardest part”. It sums up police work.
Whether waiting for the results of an autopsy or a stakeout, it’s both tense
and boring at the same time.
Renee goes surfing and has her badge and gun stolen from her car while in the water. She can’t report it missing or she’ll lose the ability to run the cold case unit. She’s made a lot of enemies since leaving the LAPD. Some of the higher ups would love to kill the unit altogether. She calls Harry for help. The trick is to get her badge back from the thieves while keeping the loss a secret until they can locate it. Another new piece to this story is the addition of Maddie Bosch, Harry’s daughter. She needs access to the Open Unsolved Unit because of some information she ran across on one of her cases. It just happens to be one of Los Angeles's most notorious homicides, the Black Dahlia murder.
I’m not sure if this is the first book that has Maddie as a cop.
It feels like she was written in a few books ago, but I must have missed it. To
me she’s always Harry’s kid, away at college or visiting her mom. But she knows
Renee Ballard from all the times spent working with Harry finding a murderer. It
makes me think she’s going to be another regular character with her own case
load and missing person’s. Most of the fan reviews about this book were
positive. But across the board, people want more Harry Bosch out of these stories.
Readers complained that he didn’t have a large part to play. Although true, it’s
not a Bosch novel. It does make me wonder if author Michael Connelly wants to
write Renee Ballard as a stand alone character with only occasional references
to Harry Bosch. Bosch is still the reader’s choice though.
I think we can expect to see Renee’s mother make an
appearance in the series as well. She is alluded to a few times via Renee’s visits
with her therapist. So there’s another possible link to Hawaii and her past.
Connelly’s a wonderful writer who could probably be a detective himself. The
city must give him a lot of access to records and police files in order to put such
compelling stories together. I don’t mean they’re all true, but the process and
politics feel very real. He had to stop writing his latest book in order to
incorporate the recent fires into the narrative. I feel like I know Los Angeles a little
better every time I read a Michael Connelly book.
No comments:
Post a Comment