Book ~ "The Late Show" (2017) Michael Connelly

From Goodreads ~ Renée Ballard works the night shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing none, as each morning she turns her cases over to day shift detectives. A once up-and-coming detective, she's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.

But one night she catches two cases she doesn't want to part with: the brutal beating of a prostitute left for dead in a parking lot and the killing of a young woman in a nightclub shooting. Ballard is determined not to give up at dawn. Against orders and her own partner's wishes, she works both cases by day while maintaining her shift by night. As the cases entwine, they pull her closer to her own demons and the reason she won't give up her job, no matter what the department throws at her.

Renée is a police officer who works the night shift (aka the late show).  She gets called out to investigations and then hands them over to the day shift officers.  Two cases happen one night that she has a hard time letting go and she ends up putting in lots of her own time with the goal of solving them.  One is a transgender prostitute who is found badly beaten and left for dead.  The victim is in a coma so Renée must do the digging on her own to figure out who had done it.  In doing so, she puts her own life in danger.  The other case is a shooting in a bar which Renée suspects may involve a dirty cop.  As she investigates these two cases, her superiors keep telling her to back off, which only makes her want to solve these cases even more.

This is the first book I've read by the author.  It caught my eye because I enjoy reading these kinds of books and the fact that it was a female detective made it sound more interesting.  I found, though, that is was a hard book to get into and I finally gave up on it about 75% of the way in.  I wasn't crazy about the writing style and I didn't feel any connection to Renée.  As a head's up, there is swearing and violence.

Renée is a surfer in her spare time and that's how she gets rid of her stress and feels a connection to her father (who died in a surfing incident when she was a teenager).  There was too much time spent talking about surfing ... the water, paddling, cleaning and waxing a board, etc.  Even though she is a police officer, she is basically homeless.  She uses her grandmother's address (hours away) as her home address and spends a bit of time there.  She sleeps in a tent with her dog on the beach (she drops the dog off when she's working with a critter sitter) or she sleeps in the the "Honeymoon Suite" at the police station.

Though I didn't enjoy this book, I'm open to checking out others by this author.