Book review: The Waiting by Michael Connelly

The Waiting by Michael Connelly offers readers multiple bangs for their buck. Or rather, several mysteries in one book. Renee Ballard and her open-unsolved crimes team are pursuing several old crimes and in the present Renee is hand-delivered an unwanted case of her own when her gun and badge are stolen. We’re also offered two Bosches for the price of one as Harry’s daughter Maddie – a cop herself – brings an old unsolved crime to Renee’s team.

Renée Ballard and the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit get a hot shot DNA connection between a recently arrested man and a serial rapist and murderer who went quiet twenty years ago. The arrested man is only twenty-three, so the genetic link must be familial. It is his father who was the Pillowcase Rapist, responsible for a five-year reign of terror in the city of angels. But when Ballard and her team move in on their suspect, they encounter a baffling web of secrets and legal hurdles.

Meanwhile, Ballard’s badge, gun, and ID are stolen—a theft she can’t report without giving her enemies in the department the ammunition they need to end her career as a detective. She works the burglary alone, but her solo mission leads her into greater danger than she anticipates. She has no choice but to go outside the department for help, and that leads her to the door of Harry Bosch.

Finally, Ballard takes on a new volunteer to the cold case unit. Bosch’s daughter Maddie wants to supplement her work as a patrol officer on the night beat by investigating cases with Ballard. But Renée soon learns that Maddie has an ulterior motive for getting access to the city’s library of lost souls.

I sometimes get antsy when there are several plots on the go – particularly if they end up converging in some far-fetched coincidence. Thankfully it’s not the case here and it does actually make sense that the team is working on a couple of different investigations to which we’re exposed to varying degrees. The main ones however include that of the Pillowcase Rapist who committed a spate of rapes before murdering a woman two decades earlier. And the case Maddie presents to the team is fell into her lap when the manager of a storage facility approached her after a gruesome discovery of photos of a woman before, during and after her murder. The Black Dahlia case was well known and – the photographs indicate – actually only one of many murders committed by the same killer, with most going undetected.

Connelly, well… Ballard explains to Maddie (and us) earlier in the book that her team focuses on crimes committed after 1976. Obviously closing any unsolved case is a cause for celebration but many committed prior to that mean the killer’s already dead and often the family and friends of the victims are also not around to see justice served. Maddie’s case here took place in 1947 so the killer is dead, but Ballard and Maddie are conscious that the photographs they found means there are more victims and families unaware of the fate of their loved ones.

As is usually the case, the journey to justice doesn’t go smoothly for Ballard and her team. The seemingly straight forward case involving the Pillowcase Rapist offers up a few twists including one that’s quite shocking; and the DA seems to have minimal interest in the Black Dahlia case despite it being handed to him on a platter.

There’s a lot happening here but Connelly keeps each of the cases ticking over and the book’s well-paced. I couldn’t really remember much about Ballard’s team of volunteers and would probably appreciate the chance to know some of them a bit better if they’re to continue to play an ongoing role in the series.

I’m really enjoying spending time with Ballard though I’m conscious I still think of her as being quite young – the cop we first met who slept in a tent on the beach – but here she plays the role of mentor to Maddie and I gather Connelly intends to replace the ageing Bosch in the annals of crime fiction royalty with his daughter… which seems fitting.

The Waiting by Michael Connelly was published in Australia by Allen & Unwin.

I received a copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.