The Dark Hours

The sixth novel in Michael Connelly's Renée Ballard series and a crossover with the Harry Bosch series, the story opens on New Year's Eve in Los Angeles. Exhausted by a year of pandemic and social unrest, LAPD Detective Renée Ballard works the late show, the midnight shift at Hollywood Division, and waits under a freeway overpass with Detective Lisa Moore of the Sexual Assault Unit, watching for the Midnight Men. This is Ballard's name for a pair of serial rapists who assault women on holiday nights, breaking into their homes, blindfolding them with tape masks, and cutting off a lock of each victim's hair. Two attacks have occurred on Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, and Ballard expects the pattern to continue.

When celebratory gunfire erupts at midnight, Ballard and Moore are dispatched to a shooting at a street party. The victim, Javier Raffa, owns a body shop and has past ties to the Las Palmas 13 street gang. Raffa dies at the hospital, and Ballard discovers gunpowder stippling at the wound, proving the shot was fired at close range: Someone used the midnight chaos to execute him. She conceals this finding to retain the case. Raffa's 15-year-old son, Gabriel, describes a suspicious white man with a shaved head who appeared at the party and mentions his father had a white business partner, a doctor.

A single .22 casing from the scene is run through the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network (NIBIN), a ballistic-evidence database. It matches an unsolved 2011 murder investigated by retired detective Harry Bosch. Ballard visits Bosch, who explains that the victim, Albert Lee, took high-interest loans from a dentist named John William James. James took over Lee's business, insured him for $1 million, and Lee was killed. James himself was murdered two years later. Bosch offers to work the Raffa case informally, and Ballard agrees.

A third Midnight Men victim, Cindy Carpenter, comes forward. A Los Feliz coffee shop manager, Carpenter was raped on New Year's Eve but waited hours before reporting. Moore has left town, so Ballard handles the case alone. Because Carpenter's tape blindfold came partially loose, she provides new details: One attacker has red pubic hair and the other dark, both wore black latex gloves, and they vacuumed the premises before leaving. Carpenter later recalls the attackers photographed or filmed her during the assault, which may explain the opaque tape blindfolds and ski masks. At Carpenter's house, Ballard finds evidence that a rapist hid in a closet before Carpenter came home, and a neighbor confirms the garage door opened while Carpenter was still at work. The rapists are targeting specific women and following them home.

Bosch traces corporate filings connecting James to Raffa's silent partner, Dr. Dennis Hoyle. Both co-own Crown Labs, a dental laboratory in Burbank, along with dentists Jason Abbott and Carlos Esquivel. The murder book, the comprehensive case file, for the James killing is also missing from the police archive under a forged name, suggesting someone inside the department stole evidence from both cases.

Walking Carpenter's street at night, Ballard learns from a neighbor that two men in a white van marked "BSL," for Bureau of Street Lighting, worked on the streetlight outside Carpenter's house two days before the attack. The driver had red hair. Ballard finds a freshly cut wire inside the light post and confirms through the actual Bureau of Street Lighting that streetlights near all three victims' homes were tampered with. The BSL uses flatbed trucks, not vans, meaning the Midnight Men impersonated city workers to darken the areas before their assaults. She asks the BSL to alert her to any new outages.

Through department records and a confidential informant, Ballard and Bosch identify Christopher Bonner, an ex-LAPD detective who once held Ballard's position, as a killer for hire connected to gang leader Humberto Viera. The informant, Viera's ex-girlfriend, confirms Bonner was a white man with a shaved head, matching Gabriel's description. Viera directed people to Bonner for illicit loans, establishing the link to Raffa.

At Raffa's memorial, Ballard and Bosch confront Hoyle, who panics and flees. The family's lawyer reveals Raffa had been trying to dissolve a partnership with no termination clause. Lieutenant Robinson-Reynolds orders Ballard off the case after learning she has been working with Bosch.

Bonner attacks Ballard in her apartment, breaking in with lockpicks and attempting to force her own gun into her mouth. She breaks free and strikes him in the throat, crushing his windpipe. With phone guidance from EMT Garrett Single, she performs a field tracheotomy. Bonner regains consciousness and deliberately pulls the breathing tube from his neck, dying before paramedics arrive. Ballard hides a burner phone she finds on him. Police recover a Walther P-22 from his car.

Placed on desk duty, Ballard lures Hoyle into an undercover car rigged with cameras. Hoyle confesses on video, naming Abbott as the mastermind of a scheme responsible for seven killings. Using Bonner's burner phone, Ballard lures Abbott to Crown Labs, where they find him bound to a chair in a staged attempt to frame himself as Bonner's victim. Ballard exposes the ruse and arrests Abbott for Raffa's murder.

Robinson-Reynolds suspends Ballard for insubordination. When the district attorney challenges her surreptitious recording of Hoyle, Ballard is temporarily reinstated to conduct a proper interview under an immunity deal. She secures Hoyle's agreement to surrender his ownership stake in Raffa's business to the Raffa family. Abbott is formally charged, and Ballard is suspended again.

The Midnight Men case reaches a crisis when the Los Angeles Times runs a story criticizing the LAPD for keeping the serial rapes quiet. Ballard suspects Moore leaked the story to damage Robinson-Reynolds after their assignment conflict. When the BSL supervisor reports a new streetlight outage outside the home of Hannah Stovall, a Hancock Park engineer who lives alone and fits the victims' pattern, Ballard devises a trap. She swaps places with Stovall, sends her to a hotel under Bosch's protection, and waits in the house. Alone, she emails her resignation from the LAPD.

The red-haired intruder enters through the garage and sweeps the house while communicating with his partner via earbud. Ballard overhears him say that "the guy" did not warn them about a feature of the house, confirming the rapists receive inside information from someone connected to the victim. She disarms and binds him, but his partner, alerted by a coded distress word, crashes through the front door. Ballard shoots both men dead. At the Force Investigation Division interview, her union attorney argues that the resignation email predates the shooting, making Ballard a private citizen who acted in lawful self-defense. The inquiry ends.

Ballard and Bosch confront Gilbert Denning, Stovall's ex-boyfriend, at the airport upon his return from Mexico. Denning admits he found the Midnight Men through Dark Web forums for men who felt wronged by women. The site, accessed via a virtual private network (VPN) and the Tor browser, tools for anonymous internet use, contains photos and videos of far more assaults than the three known to the LAPD. Ballard records the confession and plans to take the evidence to the FBI.

Days later, the chief of police visits Ballard with her old badge, asking her to return and saying the LAPD needs people who can drive change from within. Ballard asks for time to think, takes her newly adopted dog, Pinto, and goes surfing.