Michael Connelly

1

Bosch had the pills lined up on the table ready to go. He was pouring water from the bottle into the glass when the doorbell rang. He sat at the table, thinking he would let it go. His daughter had a key and never knocked, and he wasn’t expecting anyone. It had to be a solicitor or a neighbor, and he didn’t know any of his neighbors anymore. The neighborhood seemed to change over every few years, and after more than three decades of it, he had stopped meeting and greeting newcomers. He actually enjoyed being the cranky old ex-cop in the neighborhood whom people were afraid to approach.

But then the second ring was accompanied by a voice calling his name. It was a voice he recognized.

“Harry, I know you’re in there. Your car’s out front.”

He opened the drawer under the table. It contained plastic utensils, napkins, and chopsticks from takeout bags. With his hand he swept the pills into the drawer and closed it. He then got up and went to the door.

Renée Ballard stood on the front step. Bosch had not seen her in almost a year. She looked thinner than he remembered. He could see where her blazer had bunched over her sidearm on her hip.

“Harry,” she said.

“You cut your hair,” he said.

“A while ago, yeah.”

“What are you doing up here, Renée?”

She frowned as though she had expected a warmer reception. But Bosch didn’t know why she would have, after the way things had ended last year.

“Finbar,” she said.

“What?” he said.

“You know what. Finbar McShane.”

“What about him?”

“He’s still out there. Somewhere. You want to try to make a case with me, or do you want to just stand on your anger?”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you let me in, I can tell you.”

Bosch hesitated but then stepped back and held up an arm, grudgingly signaling her to enter.

Ballard walked in and stood near the table where Bosch had just been sitting.

“No music?” Ballard asked.

“Not today,” Bosch said. “So, McShane?”

She nodded, understanding that she had to get to the point.

“They put me in charge of cold cases, Harry.”

“Last I heard, the Open-Unsolved Unit was canceled. Disbanded because it wasn’t as important as putting uniforms on the street.”

“That’s true but things change. The department is under pressure to work cold cases. You know who Jake Pearlman is, right?”

“City councilman.”

“He’s actually your councilman. His kid sister was murdered way back. It was never solved. He got elected and found out the unit was quietly disbanded and there was nobody looking at cold cases.”

“And so?”

“And so I got wind of it and went to the captain with a proposal. I move over from RHD and reconstitute the Open-Unsolved Unit—work cold cases.”

“By yourself?”

“No, that’s why I’m here. The tenth floor agreed: one sworn officer—me—and the rest of the unit composed of reserves and volunteers and contract players. I didn’t come up with the idea. Other departments have been using the same model for a few years and they’re clearing cases. It’s a good model. In fact, it was your work for San Fernando that made me think of it.”

“And so you want me on this…squad, or whatever you’re calling it. I can’t be a reserve. I wouldn’t pass the physical. Run a mile in under six minutes? Forget it.”

“Right, so you’d volunteer or we’d make a contract. I pulled all the murder books on the Gallagher case. Six books for four murders—more stuff than you took with you, I’m sure. You could go back to work—officially—on McShane.”

Bosch thought about that for a few moments. McShane had wiped out the whole Gallagher family in 2013 and buried them in the desert. But Bosch had never been able to prove it. And then he retired. He hadn’t solved every case he’d been assigned in almost 30 years working murders. No homicide detective ever did. But it was a whole family. It was the one case he hated most to leave on the table.

“You know I didn’t leave on good terms,” he said. “I walked out before they could throw me out. Then I sued them. They’ll never let me back in the door.”

“If you want it, it’s a done deal,” Ballard said. “I already cleared it before I came here. It’s a different captain now and different people. I have to be honest, Harry, not a lot of people there know about you. You been gone, what, five years? Six? It’s a different department.”

“They remember me up on ten, I bet.”

The tenth floor of the Police Administration Building was where the Office of the Chief of Police and most of the department’s commanders were located.

“Well, guess what, we don’t even work out of the PAB,” Ballard said. “We’re out in Westchester at the new homicide archive. Takes a lot of the politics and prying eyes out of it.”

That intrigued Bosch.

“Six books,” he said, musing out loud.

“Stacked on an empty desk with your name on it,” Ballard said.

Bosch had taken copies of many documents from the case with him when he retired. The chrono and all the reports he thought were most important. He had worked the case intermittently since his retirement but had to acknowledge he had gotten nowhere with it, and Finbar McShane was still out there somewhere and living free. Bosch had never found any solid evidence against him but he knew in his gut and in his soul that he was the one. He was guilty. Ballard’s offer was tempting.

“So I come back and work the Gallagher Family case?” he said.

“Well, you work it, yeah,” Ballard said. “But I need you to work other cases too.”

“There’s always a catch.”

“I need to show results. Show them how wrong they were to disband the unit. The Gallagher case is going to take some work—six books to review, no DNA or fingerprint evidence that is known. It’s a shoe-leather case, and I’m fine with that, but I need to clear some cases to justify the unit and keep it going so you can work a six-book case. Will that be a problem?”

Bosch didn’t answer at first. He thought about how a year earlier Ballard had pulled the rug out on him. She had quit the department in frustration with the politics and bureaucracy, the misogyny, everything, and they had agreed to make a partnership and go private together. Then she told him she was going back, lured by a promise from the chief of police to allow her to pick her spot. She chose the Robbery-Homicide Division downtown and that was the end of the planned partnership.

“You know, I had started looking for offices,” he said. “There was a nice two-room suite in a building behind the Hollywood Athletic Club.”

“Harry, look,” Ballard said. “I’ve apologized for how I handled that but you get part of the blame.”

“Me? That’s bullshit.”

“No, you were the one who first told me you can better effect change in an organization from the inside than from the outside. And that’s what I decided. So blame me if it makes you happy, but I actually did what you told me to do.”

Bosch shook his head. He didn’t remember telling her that but he knew it was what he felt. It was what he had told his daughter when she was considering joining the department in the wake of all the recent protests and cop hate.

“Okay, fine,” he said. “I’ll do it. Do I get a badge?”

“No badge, no gun,” Ballard said. “But you do get that desk with the six books. When can you start?”

Bosch flashed for a moment on the pills he had lined up on the table a few minutes before.

“Whenever you want me to,” he said.

“Good,” Ballard said. “See you Monday, then. They’ll have a pass for you at the front desk and then we’ll get you an ID tag. They’ll have to take your photo and prints.”

“Is that desk near a window?”

Bosch smiled when he said it. Ballard didn’t.

“Don’t press your luck,” Ballard said.

–

The idea behind the Bosch and Ballard relationship is to have one outsider and one insider working together, bouncing each’s unique skills and world view off of each other – sometimes to good results,
sometimes not.

I write fiction but I write in real world terms. As the days and years go by in real life, so too with my characters. In other words, they age in real time. They evolve as the world does. This is all well and good but then I got very, very lucky. Harry Bosch stuck around. The character stayed with me and seemed to stay with the readers as well. I wanted to write more, explore more about him and the feeling was that readers would come along for the ride. The only remote issue with that is that I started him off in 1992 at age forty-two and I have been stuck with that ever since. Harry ages and as he has aged it became increasingly clear that I was bending the reality – the verisimilitude – that I cherished. So, to steer back onto course, I at first had him retire and work private investigations and volunteer work for a small police department. That was all good. But the character persisted in my creative mind. I was not through with him. I still had to do something to lengthen my time with him.

Enter Renée Ballard. Much younger, thankfully, but with the same sense of mission as Harry Bosch. I introduced her in her own book, The Late Show, knowing full well that she was the one Bosch would
eventually pass the baton to. After that introduction came the meeting of the minds in Dark Sacred Night and the continuation in The Night Fire. They worked together – realistically, I hope – on cases and fed off
each other’s differences at the same time their shared mission in life kept them together. To me, these two books are about the passing of that baton. And in The Dark Hours we see Ballard move to the front. It is clearly her book. Bosch is there, of course, but he is a step back now. He, in a way, is support staff. He is the professor realizing his student knows the lesson. The parent pushing the baby out of the nest. All of
these things came to mind as I wrote this latest novel. Ballard still needs Bosch. Not to be the teacher but to be the one who understands their joint mission and to be there when the ‘darkness follows her’. And Bosch needs Ballard to stay relevant to himself and to help him complete the mission.
– Michael Connelly

The audiobook is read by Christine Lakin and Titus Welliver.

*AudioFile Magazine Earphones Award Winner

Michael Connelly introduces The Dark Hours.

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THE DARK HOURS book trailer from Little, Brown and Company.

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Michael Connelly Presents THE DARK HOURS Location Tour

“This is a masterpiece.”
– Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“The fourth Renée Ballard and Harry Bosch novel is the best yet, both because Ballard has evolved into one of crime fiction’s richest, most complex characters and because Connelly takes an unflinching look at policing in the post–George Floyd era.”
– Booklist Starred Review

“Again and again, Michael Connelly amazes with his penetrating look inside the machinery of the LAPD, all while keeping the human hearts inside the machine front and center. The Dark Hours is another perfect example”
– Amazon Editors’ Picks – Amazon Books Editors Top 10 Books Of November

“Sharp observations of characters, from victims to perpetrators, make this entry a standout.”
– Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal, Top Crime Novels Of 2021

“in this stellar series… …no one who follows Ballard and Bosch to the end will be disappointed. A bracing test of the maxim that “the department always comes first. The department always wins.””
– Kirkus Reviews

“This is a compelling listen with a gritty portrayal of the current social environment.”
– AudioFile Magazine Earphones Award Winner

“Few writers have ever managed to grab and hold readers’ attention the way Michael Connelly has the last three decades, and The Dark Hours is yet another reminder that we’re witnessing one of the all-time greats . . . who’s shown absolutely no signs of slowing down anytime soon.”
– The Real Book Spy

“It’s a masterclass.”
– Simon McDonald

“outstanding…We’ve said before that Connelly is the most consistently superior living crime fiction author. “The Dark Hours’ just reinforces that.”
– Oline Cogdill, Sun- Sentinel, The Best Mystery Books Of 2021

“The Dark Hours is an authentic, topical and terrifying thriller: one of Michael Connelly’s very best.”
– Mark Sanderson, The Times (UK)

“Ballard and Bosch are a great combination as they work in and around a police force that Ballard believes too often aims to “protect and serve the image instead of the citizens.””
– Richard Lipez, The Washington Post‘s Best Thrillers & Mysteries Of November

“In Michael Connelly’s ‘The Dark Hours,’ Ballard and Bosch just get better…He’s one of the best in the business at writing about investigations and creating intense suspense, but the relationship between Ballard and Bosch — a professional friendship that grows out of two brilliant minds dedicated to the same difficult but important work — is the cherry on top.”
– Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

“a veteran crime writer returns with a thrill-packed yet incisive look at present-day America.”
– Readers Digest

“Connelly is sharp as ever and his stories always manage to explore another piece of the city’s soul.”
– CrimeReads

“It’s Connelly’s thirty-sixth novel and, like the other thirty-five, it is frighteningly good.”
– Mike Ripley, Shots Crime & Thriller eZine

“THE DARK HOURS is a top 3 Connelly book. 29 years in and he’s still bringing his fastball. Amazing. Preorder this book!”
– Sean Cameron, The Crew Reviews

“The consistently excellent Connelly’s latest thriller faces up to the challenges of contemporary policing”
– The Mail On Sunday (UK)

“The Dark Hours is yet another superb thriller from a writer at the top of his game and will delight the millions of fans of the Bosch books and the accompanying TV drama starring Titus Welliver.”
– The Sunday Express (UK)

“A topical thriller, sensitively handled by a real crime pro.”
– The Scottish Sun (UK)

“The Dark Hours is the most riveting of Connelly’s Renée Ballard novels, and a hopeful signpost for the future of the police procedural.”
– Paula Woods, Alta Journal

“The Dark Hours is a book of our times – I urge you to read it.’
– Crime Fiction Lover

1

It was supposed to rain for real and that would have put a damper on the annual rain of lead. But the forecast was wrong. The sky was blue-black and clear. And Ballard braced for the onslaught, positioning herself on the north side of the division under the shelter of the Cahuenga overpass. She would have preferred being alone but was riding with a partner, and a reluctant partner at that. Detective Lisa Moore of the Hollywood Division Sexual Assault Unit was a day-shift veteran who just wanted to be home with her boyfriend. But it was always all hands on deck on New Year’s Eve. Tactical alert: everyone in the department in uniform and working twelves. Ballard and Moore had been working since six p.m. and it had been quiet. But it was now about to strike midnight on the last day of the year and the trouble would begin. Added to that, the Midnight Men were out there somewhere. Ballard and her reluctant partner needed to be ready to move quickly when the call came in.

“Do we have to stay here?” Moore asked. “I mean, look at these people. How can they live like this?”

Ballard surveyed the makeshift shelters made of discarded tarps and construction debris that lined both sides of the underpass. She saw a couple of Sterno cook fires and people milling about at their meager encampments. It was so crowded that some shanties were even pressed up against the mobile toilets the city had put on the sidewalks to preserve some semblance of dignity and sanitation in the area. North of the overpass was a residential zone of apartments fronting the hillside area known as the Dell. After multiple reports of people defecating in the streets and yards of the neighborhood, the city came through with the portable toilets. A “humanitarian effort,” it was called.

“You ask that like you think they all want to be living under an overpass,” Ballard said. “Like they have a lot of choices. Where are they going to go? The government gives them toilets. It takes their shit away but not much else.”

“Whatever,” Moore said. “It’s such a blight—every overpass in the fucking city. It’s so third world. People are going to start leaving the city because of this.”

“They already have,” Ballard said. “Anyway, we’re staying here. I’ve spent the last four New Year’s Eves under here and it’s the safest place to be when the shooting starts.”

They were quiet for a few moments after that. Ballard had thought about leaving herself, maybe going back to Hawaii. It wasn’t because of the intractable problem of homelessness that gripped Los Angeles. It was everything. The city, the job, the life. It had been a bad year with the pandemic and social unrest and violence. The police department had been vilified, and she along with it. She’d been spat on, figuratively and literally, by the people she thought she stood for and protected. It was a hard lesson, and a sense of futility had set upon her and was deep in the marrow now. She needed some kind of a break. Maybe to go track down her mother in the mountains of Maui and try to reconnect after so many years.

She took one of her hands off the wheel and held her sleeve to her nose. It was her first time back in uniform since the protests. She could make out the smell of tear gas. She had dry-cleaned the uniform twice but the odor was baked in, permanent. It was a strong reminder of the year that had been.

The pandemic and protests had changed everything. The department went from being proactive to reactive. And the change had somehow cast Ballard adrift. She had found herself more than once thinking about quitting. That is, until the Midnight Men came along. They had given her purpose.

Moore checked her watch again. Ballard noticed and glanced at the dashboard clock. It was off by an hour, but doing the math told her it was two minutes till midnight.

“Oh, here we go,” Moore said. “Look at this guy.”

She was looking out her window at a man approaching the car. It was below 60 degrees but he wore no shirt and was holding his dirt-caked pants up with his hand. He wore no mask either. Moore had her window cracked but now hit the button and closed and sealed the car.

The homeless man knocked on her window. They could hear him through the glass.

“Hey, officers, I got a problem here.”

They were in Ballard’s unmarked car but she had engaged the flashing grille lights when they parked in the median under the overpass. Plus they were in full uniform.

“Sir, I can’t talk to you without a mask,” Moore said loudly. “Go get a mask.”

“But I been ripped off,” the man said. “That sumbitch o’er there took my shit when I was sleepin’.”

“Sir, I can’t help you until you get a mask,” Moore said.

“I don’t have no fucking mask,” he said.

“Then I’m sorry, sir,” she said. “No mask, no ask.”

The man punched the window, his fist hitting the glass in front of Moore’s face. She jerked back even though it had not been a punch intended to break the glass.

“Sir, step back from the car,” Moore commanded.

“Fuck you,” he said.

“Sir, if I have to get out, you’re going to County,” Moore said. “If you don’t have corona now, you’ll get it there. You want that?”

The man started to walk away.

“Fuck you,” he said again. “Fuck the police.”

“Like I never heard that before,” Moore said.

She checked her watch again and Ballard looked back at the dash clock. It was now the final minute of 2020, and for Moore and most people in the city and the world, the year couldn’t end soon enough.

“Jesus Christ, can we move to another spot?” Moore complained.

“Too late,” Ballard said. “I told you, we’re safe under here.”

“Not from these people,” Moore said.

2

It was like a bag of popcorn cooking in a microwave. A few pops during the final countdown of the year and then the barrage as the frequency of gunfire made it impossible to separate it into individual discharges. A gunshot symphony. For a solid five minutes, there was an unbroken onslaught as revelers of the new year fired their weapons into the sky, following a Los Angeles tradition of decades.

It didn’t matter that what goes up must come down. Every new year in the City of Angels began with risk.

The gunfire of course was joined by legitimate fireworks and firecrackers, creating a sound unique to the city and as reliable through the years as the changing of the calendar. The over/under at roll call was eighteen in terms of calls related to the rain of lead. Windshields mostly would be the victims, though the year before, Ballard caught a report of a bullet falling through a skylight and hitting a stripper on the shoulder who was dancing on a stage below. The falling bullet didn’t even break the skin. But a jagged piece of falling skylight glass did give a customer sitting close to the stage a new part in his hair. He chose not to make a police report, because it would reveal that where he was didn’t match where he had told his family he would be.

Whatever the number of calls, patrol would handle most of them unless a detective was warranted. Ballard and Moore were mostly waiting for one call. The Midnight Men. It was a painful reality that sometimes you needed predators to strike again in hopes of a mistake or a new piece of evidence that could lead to a solve.

The Midnight Men was the unofficial moniker Ballard had bestowed on the tag team rapists who had assaulted two women in a five-week span. Both assaults had occurred on holiday nights—Thanksgiving night and Christmas Eve. The cases were linked by modus operandi, not DNA, because the Midnight Men were careful not to leave DNA behind. Each attack started shortly after midnight and lasted as long as four hours while the predators took turns assaulting women in their own beds, ending the torture by cutting off a large hank of each victim’s hair with the knife that had been held to her throat during the ordeal. Other humiliations were included in the attacks and helped link the cases beyond the rarity of a two-man rape team.

Ballard, as the third watch detective, had been the responding detective on both cases. She had then called in day-watch detectives from the Hollywood Division Sexual Assault Unit. Lisa Moore was a member of that three-detective unit. Since Ballard worked the shift when the attacks had occurred, she was informally added to the team.

In past years, a pair of serial rapists would have immediately drawn the attention of the Sex Crimes Unit that worked out of the Police Administration Building downtown as part of the elite Robbery-Homicide Division. But City Hall cutbacks in police funding had seen the unit disbanded, and sex assault cases were now handled by the divisional detective squads. It was an example of how protesters demanding the defunding of the police department had achieved their goal in an indirect way. The move to defund was turned away by the city’s politicians, but the police department had burned through its budget in dealing with the protests that followed the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis. After weeks of tactical alert and associated costs, the department was out of money and the result was freezes on hiring, the disbanding of units, and the end of several programs. In effect, the department had been defunded in several key areas.

Lisa Moore was a perfect example of how all of this led to a downgrade in service to the community. Rather than the Midnight Men investigation going to a specialized unit with many resources as well as detectives who had extra training and experience in serial investigations, it had gone to the overworked and understaffed Hollywood Division sex crime team, which was responsible for investigating every rape, attempted rape, assault, groping, indecent exposure, and claim of pedophilia in a vast geographic and population-dense area. And Moore was like many in the department since the protests, looking to do as little as possible between now and her retirement four years from now. She was looking at the Midnight Men case as a time suck taking her away from her normal eight-to-four existence, where she dutifully filed paperwork the first half of the day and conducted minimal investigative work after that, leaving the station only if there was no way the work could be done by phone and computer. She had greeted her assignment to work the midnight shift with Ballard over the New Year’s holiday as a major insult and inconvenience. Ballard, on the other side of that coin, had seen it as a chance to get closer to taking down two predators who were out there hurting women.

“What do you hear about the vax?” Moore asked.

Ballard shook her head.

“Probably the same as you hear,” she said. “Next month—maybe.”

Now Moore shook her head.

“Assholes,” she said. “We’re first-fucking-responders and should get it with the fire department. Instead we’re with the grocery workers.”

“The fire guys are considered health-care providers,” Ballard said. “We’re not.”

“I know, but it’s the principle of it. Our union is shit.”

“It’s not the union. It’s the governor, the health department, a lot of things.”

“Fuckin’ politicians…”

Ballard let it go. It was a complaint heard often at roll calls and in police cars across the city. Like many in the department, Ballard had already contracted COVID-19. She had been knocked down for three weeks in November and now just hoped she had enough antibodies to see her through to the vaccine’s arrival.

During the brooding silence that followed, a patrol car pulled up next to them on Moore’s side, in one of the two southbound lanes.

“You know these guys?” Moore asked as she reached for the window button.

“Unfortunately,” Ballard said. “Pull your mask up.”

It was a team of P2s named Smallwood and Vitello, who always had too much testosterone running in their blood. They also thought they were “too healthy” to contract the virus and eschewed the department-mandated mask requirement.

Moore lowered the window after pulling her mask up.

“How’s things in the tuna boat?” Smallwood said, a wide smile on his face.

Ballard pulled up her department-issued mask. It was navy blue with LAPD embossed in silver along the jaw line.

“You’re blocking traffic there, Smallwood,” Ballard said.

Moore looked back at Ballard.

“Really?” she whispered. “Small wood?”

Ballard nodded.

Vitello hit the switch for the light bar on the patrol car’s roof. Flashing blue lit up the graffiti on the concrete walls above the tents and shanties on both sides of the overpass. Various versions of “Fuck the Police” and “Fuck Trump” had been whitewashed by city crews but the messages came through under the penetrating blue light.

“How’s that?” Vitello asked.

“Hey, there’s a guy over there, wants to report a theft of property,” Ballard responded. “Why don’t you two go take a report?”

“Fuck that,” Smallwood said.

“Sounds like detective work to me,” Vitello added.

The conversation, if it could be called that, was interrupted by the voice of a com center dispatcher coming up on the radio in both cars, asking for any 6-William unit, “6” being the designation for Hollywood, and “William” for detective.

“That’s you, Ballard,” Smallwood said.

Ballard pulled the radio out of its charger in the center console and responded.

“Six-William-twenty-six. Go ahead.”

The dispatcher asked her to respond to a shooting with injury on Gower.

“The Gulch,” Vitello called over. “Need backup down there, ladies?”

Hollywood Division was broken into seven different patrol zones called Basic Car Areas. Smallwood and Vitello were assigned to the area that included the Hollywood Hills, where crime was low and most of the residents they encountered were white. This was a move designed to keep them out of trouble and away from confrontational enforcement with minorities. However, it had not always worked. Ballard had heard about them roughing up teenagers in cars parked illegally on Mulholland Drive, where there were spectacular views of the city at night.

“I think we can handle it,” Ballard called across. “You boys can go back up to Mulholland and watch for kids throwing their condoms out the window. Make it safe up there, guys.”

She dropped the car into drive and hit the gas before either Smallwood or Vitello could manage a comeback.

“Poor guy,” Moore said without sympathy in her voice. “Officer Smallwood.”

“Yeah,” Ballard said. “And he tries to make up for it every night on patrol.”

Moore laughed as they sped south on Cahuenga.

–