Michael Connelly: THE WAITING

Renée Ballard’s team reopening old cold murder cases has a new member: Maddie Bosch, Harry Bosch’s daughter fresh out of training college. Mattie is standing in for her father, who’s undergoing chemotherapy and makes only brief appearances. A DNA hit identifies the likely perpetrator of a twenty-year-old series of rapes that culminated in a murder. But Maddie chances upon a stash of photographs that potentially unlocks one of Los Angeles’s most notorious unsolved murders, the ‘so-called “Black Dahlia” killing of 1947.

The two cases run side by side. As usual, Ballard’s team are hampered by a section chief obsessed with cost-cutting and a District Attorney with a grudge against the department.  Maddie proves to have her father’s gift for digging down to the bare bones of a case. The murder of a team member provides a shock preface to Ballard’s confrontation with the killer/rapist.

Michael Connelly’s great gift is to take his readers deftly through the daily slog of interviews and searches that maker up a murder investigation, whether it’s contemporary or a cold case. His short crisp chapters totally eliminate the tedium that must accompany these cases in the real world. The tension is near constant and builds, as always, to a satisfying climax.

As for the Black Dahlia, if you go to Wikipedia you’ll find there have been dozens of named suspects over the decades. He’s America’s equivalent of Jack the Ripper. An unsolved crime can enthral us as much as one that ends in a judicial execution or a whole-life sentence.