Well, Christmas has come and gone and we have landed safely in 2021. In some ways it felt like we would be stuck in 2020 forever. The tolling of the bell doesn’t change anything, of course, but with the dawn of 2021 and covid vaccines on their way, we have hope for the future! Still need to escape? Start a new series with these great deals!
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.
I have previously posted about the first two books in the Renee Ballard series by Michael Connelly (The Late Show and Dark Sacred Night). So, it should come as no surprise that I picked up the third when I saw it was available.
Ballard and Bosch are getting to know each other a bit better in this episode, but they are also working cases separately from each other as well. You never know how all of the cases are going to connect up, or if they will. But if you are familiar Connelly, you know it will all come together somehow in the end.
Ballard always remembered the words of a late-show patrol poet. He called them human tumbleweeds moving with the winds of fate
Michael Connelly, The Night Fire
Back when Harry Bosch was just a rookie homicide detective, he had an inspiring mentor who taught him to take the work personally and light the fire of relentlessness for every case. Now that mentor, John Jack Thompson, is dead, and his widow gives Bosch a murder book, one that Thompson took with him when he left the LAPD twenty years before — the unsolved killing of a troubled young man.
Bosch takes the murder book to Detective Renée Ballard and asks her to help him discover what about this crime lit Thompson’s fire all those years ago. As she begins her inquiries — while still working her own cases on the midnight shift — Ballad finds aspects of the initial investigation that just don’t add up.
The bond between Bosch and Ballard tightens as they become a formidable investigation team. And they soon arrive at a disturbing question: Did Thompson steal the murder book to work the case in retirement, or to make sure it never got solved?
Ooh, sounds so good! It has been too long since I read one from this series. Here’s mine: “SHELTER IN PLACE”