By Michael Connelly
I'm glad I finished Dark Sacred Night two days before Christmas Eve. Michael Connelly paints a 21st century portrait of the world Christ entered; dark and riddled with evil. But the Bosch creator, mirroring a bigger story, reminds us people matter and there are glimmers of justice and redemption.
To me, that is the "sacred" in the Dark Sacred Night.
Harry Bosch operates by the axiom, "Everybody counts in this world or nobody counts." That's why he's still on the Daisy Clayton murder, the 2009 cold case of the murdered daughter of Elizabeth whom we meet in Two Kinds of Truth.
Connelly delivers in typical Connelly fashion: Lively pace, believable story, and characters we could meet on the street. Connelly also highlights challenges: opioids, runaways and street prostitution, predatory pornography, as well as cops that are straight and cops that are not.
Harry Bosch is 80 grit sandpaper and so are the Bosch novels -- gritty. Some end happy, some do not. This piece of dialogue between Bosch and investigator Dennis "Cisco" Wojciechowski might be typical. The duo tried to help a distraught druggie, but it did not end well. They commiserate:
They stayed silent for a long moment before Cisco broke the silence.
"I thought she was stronger, you know? That week I spent with her--her breaking it off cold--I saw something. I thought she could go the distance."
"Yeah, me too. But I guess you never know, right?
Right.
The book ends, but we don't see silver hues lining the dark clouds.
I appreciate the way Maureen Corrigan puts it in her October 31, 2018 review of Dark Sacred Night for the Washington Post, "Melancholy hangs thick as smog over this series as Bosch." True, but there is one constant from Bosch (and apparently Connelly too). He won't quit!