As Harry continues to investigate the murder of Lexi Parks, the wife of a police-officer, Honey Chandler is trying to form a defense for her client David Foster who is charged with that murder. Harry wasn’t initially sure that Foster – who had been caught in several lies so far – was innocent and Harry isn’t of the mind to damage his reputation with the police any further by suggesting someone isn’t doing their job right. However, he can’t deny that some of the facts simply don’t add up and that the case could be far more complicated than first expected. Their investigations are not welcome by two cops with a vested interest in Foster being blamed and are keeping close tabs on Bosch and Chandler. Unfortunately, they aren’t the only people interested in Harry and Chandler’s movements.
Elsewhere, Maddie experiences her first day on the new police squad on Hollywood Boulevard and realises she might still have some issues to work through…
*spoilers*
It’s interesting that while the show is hitting some of the beats of The Crossing novel, it’s playing them out in refreshing ways. In Connelly’s earlier tome, The Concrete Blonde, Honey ‘Money’ Chandler (here essayed by Mimi Rogers) was an interesting, ruthless character in opposition to Bosch investigations but did not survive into further novels and many of the story beats in these current episodes are actually resonant of the cautious and more layered Bosch/Mickey Haller partnership of The Crossing in which Harry loses some allies in the force as he ‘crosses over’ to the defense side of proceedings (and also looks for the point where victim and killer ‘crossed paths’ – hence the double-meaning of the title). Such a pairing of the two half-brothers isn’t possible in the current television landscape because though Connelly’s work is becoming ever more popular, Amazon holds the rights to Bosch while Netflix has The Lincoln Lawyer series). So there are some tweaks and twists – with Chandler assuming the Haller aspects – during the viewing of these episodes that make the story both familiar and new to long-term fans of Harry – and perhaps that’s the best of both worlds. (It should also be noted that it’s made even more meta-textual when you’re watching these episodes of Bosch: Legacy while simultaneously reading the new Bosch/Haller team-up Resurrection Walk – due out in a couple of weeks and ready to be reviewed here shortly).
The show continues to blend the stories of Chandler, Bosch and his daughter Maggie as deftly as any procedural and we remain invested in them all as characters and coinfidantes. Harry and Chandler are in the position of playing cat-and-mouse with the FBI who knows that they had something to do with the fate of last season’s criminal businessman Carl Rogers – suspecting, with some justification, that Bosch and his allies went so far as to damage an oil-line to bring down the wrath of the already-involved Russian mob on their suspect. (They didn’t intend for him to die, merely force his hand). The catch is that while the FBI is scrutinising their every move, Bosch and Chandler are also being targeted by two corrupt detectives because of the murder case the team is working on. We know – though Harry and Chandler don’t yet appreciate the extent of it – that their moves are being tracked and bugged and are likely putting them in real danger, It’s all linked to a watch that appears to have gone missing from the murder victim and which Harry is already sniffing out clues.
Maddie recruitment into the police team that patrols downtown Hollywood is a development that allows us to see her journey as a relatively new police-officer through a different lens than her sometimes world-weary father. Maddie is good at her job but there’s clearly elements that show she’s not fully recovered from her kidnap ordeal and that her anger can boil up in the heat of a pursuit (even her mentor notes that Maddie’s righteous takedown of a miscreant working the boulevard had some moments of unnecessary violence. The show is pacing those elements well, not solving them in a single moment nor letting them become such a weight that they feel artificial – Maddie acknowledges that there’s a potential problem and promises to try and be aware. The sixth episode shows her giving her honest impact statement in court against her attacker and it’s very powerful stuff with Lintz bringing her A-game, so we’ll see how that develops.
These episodes (the fifth and sixth in the ten-part season) move along at just the right pace and – as in the books – it makes you pay attention as the often very different pieces and threads weave in and out of each other’s orbits and only start to form the whole as we progress. But so far, with all the new material and further plans for development, it’s both a good time to be Michael Connelly and to be a Michael Connelly fan.
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