TV Tuesday: Bosch

With a lot of our favorite winter shows wrapping up on cable, we've been watching more on Amazon Prime & Netflix lately. One of our favorite Amazon shows just came back for its second season, and it's better than ever!

My husband and I are both long-time fans of the crime thrillers starring LAPD detective Harry Bosch, written by Michael Connelly. He has written reliably fast-paced, intriguing page-turners for decades. Besides the Bosch novels, he is also the author of the Lincoln Lawyer series, which has been adapted into movies starring Matthew McConaughey. Amazon Prime's show Bosch is based on his best-selling books, and they have done a fantastic job of bringing this popular series to life on the screen.

Harry Bosch, played by Titus Welliver ("the man in black" from Lost), is an experienced LAPD homicide detective who is known for his tenacity...and for doing whatever it takes to bring a killer to justice. He is often in trouble with his superiors, but he gets the job done. He is driven in part by the still-unsolved murder of his own mother. Harry's partner, Jerry Edgar - affectionately called J. Edgar by Harry, is always perfectly dressed, and he and Harry work well together. Harry is divorced, and his ex-wife, played by Sarah Clarke, and teen daughter live in Las Vegas. Harry gets along well with his immediate supervisor, Lt. Grace Billet, played by Amy Aquino, but he often clashes with Deputy Chief Irvin Irving, played by Lance Reddick, mostly because Irving pays more attention to politics and climbing the ladder than to police work.

In season one, Bosch and J. Edgar and their colleagues were after a serial killer, while also trying to solve a decades old case based on children's bones found on a hillside. Those two cases were interwoven into the entire season, with bits and pieces of Bosch's personal life feeding into the ongoing story. Season two is based on Connelly's novel Trunk Music, where a dead body is found in a car trunk. Again, the main case carries on through the entire season, with other secondary plot lines coming into play, including more with Bosch's ex-wife and daughter and Deputy Chief Irving's son (who is a police officer) going undercover with IA to try to catch some dirty cops.

The show has been excellent right from the very first episode. It sticks closely to the books - with the characters and major cases - while adding in a lot of extra detail on the characters' personal lives and secondary cases. The tone, the actors, the pace, and the ambience (including Bosch's beloved jazz as the soundtrack) are all just perfect for fans of the books. Titus Welliver in particular is the quintessential Bosch, while J. Edgar and Deputy Chief Irving also seem exactly as I pictured them in the novels. It's a very well-done show, with gripping, suspenseful mysteries but also plenty of emotional depth and human interest. We are really enjoying seeing one of our favorite fictional characters come to life!

As an Amazon Original Series, Bosch is available only on Amazon, free to Prime members or $1.99 an episode for non-members.