In Season 6, ‘Bosch’ deals with disaster

When Season 6 of Bosch drops on Amazon on April 17, viewers might feel a few eerie resonances that the series’ makers couldn’t have anticipated.

In the second episode, Los Angeles Police Detective Harry Bosch’s daughter, Maddie, asks him why he’s unusually worried. He won’t tell her about the case he’s working, but he does say, “Just stay inside the next couple of days. Come home straight after work.”

Bosch is dealing with domestic terrorism, not a pandemic, but an undertone of dread is there in this season of Amazon’s longest-running original series, based on the 22 bestselling books about Bosch by author Michael Connelly, who has a home in Tampa.

Connelly has had hands-on involvement with the show throughout its run, as an executive producer and writer. Each season, the plot arc draws from material in several of his books.

In the first five episodes made available for review, Season 6 takes much of its plot from The Overlook (2007). The first episode opens with the theft of radioactive cesium from a hospital by a medical physicist, who is then shot execution style by a masked man.

The cesium vanishes. There’s enough of it to cause mass casualties and render the city uninhabitable for 300 years. No wonder Harry is worried. But he barely gets his murder investigation underway before the FBI arrives to bigfoot it.

As Harry and the FBI circle around each other, and around a heavily armed sovereign citizens group, L.A. Police Chief Irvin Irving (Lance Reddick) is launching a run for mayor and recoiling at the back-room politics that seem unavoidable.

Harry’s partner, Jerry Edgar (Jaime Hector), is pursuing a complicated case that involves a Proust-reading Haitian gangster. Maddie Bosch has a new internship — in the law office of Harry’s frenemy Honey Chandler (Mimi Rogers) — and a cute new boyfriend, a pediatric nurse who might regret his wish to meet her father.

In addition to the cesium theft, Harry is working a cold case that he was drawn into in Season 5. In a plot line from Dark Sacred Night (2018), he looks for the killer of a runaway teenager, Daisy Clayton, whose mother, Elizabeth, he rescued from a drug ring last season.

Titus Welliver as Harry is the soul of the series, and he’s as intense as ever as the driven detective (although he’s grown some fluffy white sideburns that are downright cuddly).

Bosch has been renewed for a seventh season, but it will be the final one. When we’ll see it is an open question, given that filming for TV and movies is on hold for now.

But I’m looking forward to it, whenever it arrives. As a longtime fan of Connelly’s books, and especially of Harry Bosch, I can remember thinking when I first heard about the series, “Oh please please please don’t let TV ruin it.”

It hasn’t.