The Waiting (2024)

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One thing longtime Michael Connelly fans should know before diving into The Waiting, which is being marketed as a Ballard and Bosch adventure, is that the “Bosch” could mean one of two characters; retired LA detective Harry Bosch, easily the writer’s most popular character, or his daughter, Maddy Bosch, now working as a patrol officer in the LAPD but dreams of following in her (in)famous dad’s grizzled footsteps.

Last year’s Resurrection Walk, which heavily focused on Harry Bosch and Mickey “Lincoln Lawyer” Haller, left little room for Ballard (minus an extended cameo), but here the Connellyverse continues to coalesce around Renée Ballard as its new center, functioning as a dual “passing of the touch” for both the series’ lead as well as the expected generational transition from father to daughter. There’s a lot going on in The Waiting, both procedurally and psychologically, and it’s just a shame it feels a little overstuffed – and undercooked – this time around.

The beach is Renée Ballard’s safe spot, the one place she can relax and be alone with her thoughts when surfing among the waves. Unfortunately, while out in the water she hadn’t noticed the thieves prowling in cars parked on the shore, hers included. Upon returning she realizes the thieves nabbed her wallet, phone, and (worst of all) her badge. Already on thin ice with the higher ups, Ballard worries her negligence could be the tipping point to end her career and keeps her purloined badge to herself.

What she assumed would be an investigation into pilfered items leads to something far worse as she uncovers a terrorism plot orchestrated by a supremacist group with ties to people involved in the January 6th riots.

As head of the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit, Ballard gets lucky when a recent arrest sent back a ping on a chance familial DNA search she’d requested the year before. It wasn’t the perp that interested Ballard, though, but what his DNA result showed; that he was genetically related to the Pillowcase Rapist, who’d sexually assaulted dozens of women for over half a decade using a pillowcase to hide his face during his attacks. But after choking one of his victims to death back in 2005 he appeared to stop, or possibly moved away, and the investigation went nowhere.

At long last, there’s a chance Ballard’s unit might finally bring the rapist to justice, but things become complicated (both professionally and personally) when the DNA profile suggests a familial connection to a Superior Court Judge.

Maddie Bosch’s dream takes one step closer to reality when Ballard accepts her request to volunteer in the Open-Unsolved Unit. It’s not long before Maddie lands perhaps the biggest break any investigator has ever landed when an unclaimed storage unit yields a surprising cache of evidence in perhaps the most popular unsolved murder case in LA history, that of Elizabeth Short, a 22 year-old murdered in 1947, her corpse found severed at the waist and dumped on a street.

Short’s death would become known as the Black Dahlia Murder, and the storage unit contained several gruesome photos, not just of a woman who resembled Short, but other women who presumably met the same fate, their unsolved disappearances thought lost to history. Now it’s up to Ballard, Bosch, and the rest of the Unit to piece together enough evidence to solve the coldest of cold cases.

Despite the allure of not one, but three different cases occurring simultaneously the real story of The Waiting is the continuing character development of Renée Ballard, hardly a surprise as she’s been groomed to replace Harry Bosch as Connelly’s preeminent literary detective moving forward (the character recently appeared in Amazon’s live-action Bosch: Legacy series, played by actress Maggie Q).

Since her introduction back in the 2017 novel The Late Show, Ballard has taken the lead in most of Connelly’s output, each new adventure revealing more of her psychological makeup and what motivates her desire for justice. She often struggles to balance her temper when dealing with subordinates, battles the expected red-tape (and outright corruption) of office politics, attends therapy, and tries to strike the right balance of work and personal space. Perhaps locating her missing mother, who abandoned Ballard when she was just a teenager, might help the daughter find closure?

All of these things help shape Ballard not just as a defender of justice, but as a human being. It’s in these moments where Connelly, typically an author who excels in procedural crime sausage factory fiction, finds just the right ingredients to make his new heroine a compelling lead. While hardly the paragon of virtue that her mentor was, Ballard’s willingness to bend the rules just enough makes her more than just a female Pacific Islander version of Harry Bosch.

Speaking of Bosch, battling cancer, plays more a peripheral role here, assisting Ballard in the book’s most action-packed case, his participation drawing the most scrutiny out of sheer implausibility given everything we’ve been told about the character’s deteriorating health and advanced age. It’s a criticism we’ve seen time and time again in Connelly’s more recent outings, which should be expected given the corner he’s painted himself into. He doesn’t want to let Harry Bosch go, and neither do his fans.

In many ways, The Waiting feels like a necessary transition novel, for both Michael Connelly and his myriad of fans who’ve come to expect a certain panache in both his characters and their adventures in the seedier side of Los Angeles. Here they’ve got three cases to follow, but this means the narrative often buckles under the strain of trying to juggle so much at once, with resolutions coming a little too hastily and conveniently to be truly satisfying.