Dark Sacred Night

Night shift detective Renée Ballard (The Late Show) of the LAPD Hollywood Division returns from a scene early one morning to find a stranger rummaging through an office file cabinet. She soon learns that the man is retired detective Harry Bosch, and he's looking into the cold case murder of a teenage girl. After reading up on the case, Ballard approaches Bosch and offers to help. She learns that the dead girl was the daughter of a woman living in Bosch's house—a woman he met while working undercover as a pill shill (Two Kinds of Truths). Digging through field interview cards from nearly a decade before, the detectives uncover a lead. At the same time, Ballard is working a homicide and Bosch is looking into a gang killing for the San Fernando Police Department. Despite a structural formula of parallel story lines similar to other recent Bosch entries, the partnership between the detectives makes it feel fresh. Bosch's reckless instincts are tempered by Ballard's by-the-books attitude.