Bestselling author Michael Connelly is grappling with real-life woes (his Siesta Key, Fla., house was pummeled by Hurricane Milton).
So are his characters.
“The Waiting,” Connelly’s 39th book and the sixth featuring cold-case cop Renee Ballard, finds Ballard’s team tackling multiple mysteries, including two that are ripped from the headlines: the Pillowcase Rapist, who assaulted more than 40 Californians beginning in the 1970s. And the Black Dahlia, a starlet who was murdered and dismembered in 1947, a crime that has never been solved.
Connelly’s most famous character, former LAPD cop Harry Bosch, also makes an appearance in “The Waiting” and continues to feature in the Amazon series “Bosch” (but not yet in “The Lincoln Lawyer” series on Netflix). In a chat with Connelly, 68, he reveals that Bosch, who’s about a decade older than Connelly, isn’t going anywhere soon:
Q: With both Harry Bosch and Mickey “Lincoln Lawyer” Haller so popular, what was the impetus to create the character of Ballard?
A: Harry ages in real time and he was getting up there to a point I knew he could still do stuff — and there’s a whole thing in law enforcement of retired guys working cold cases — but his age was becoming a creative issue, so I was looking around for someone new.
For a long time, I’ve had a little cadre of homicide detectives who helped me with my books. One I met through the others, Mitzi Roberts. One day when I had lunch with her and was shooting the breeze, I asked how she got into detective work. She was pretty young and I asked how she did it. She said, “I volunteered for a shift no one wanted, the midnight shift in Hollywood.”

Q: And a light bulb went on?