I was an early subscriber to Audible when it first set up in the early 2000s…I was doing a lot of rowing in the gym and needed something to keep my mind alive while going back and forward, back and forward, etc, etc, etc; and I was also driving Wellington-Auckland on a  regular basis for work (yes, I could have flown but it was nice to have the flexibility to stop along the way and visit places and friends)…

Back then, Audible had an introductory offer where they would gift you a Rio MP3 player with a whole 64Mb of memory on-board if you subscribed for a year or more -the subscription entitling me to two books each month from the library – even for USD14.95 when the Kiwi dollar was pretty depressed, with each Audible book around 8-16 hours, it was a good deal.

I would often forget about the subscription until just before the drop dead time – the subscriptions didn’t roll over so it was use them or lose them – and have to select the first two books that seemed even remotely interesting. Thus my Audible library was always a tad eclectic and my rule was that any book I started to listen, I would see through to the end, on some occasions the bitter bitter end..

So, that’s how I stumbled onto Michael Connolly, first through his standalone Chasing the Dime, and from there into my first Bosch novel, which I think was Lost Light…Over the next decade plus, I slowly acquired more Connolly novels, in digital and hard copy formats…Bosch was the man though, I could never get into the Lincoln Lawyer series but did enjoy Blood Work (the book is better than the movie). Blood Work (not one of Clint’s better efforts) and The Lincoln Lawyer movie put me off seeking any further screen adaptions and the little I had seen online about the Bosch series did nothing to change that.

Last week, I needed to put new tyres on the truck – winter roads need robust tread – and took the opportunity to have a wander around Taumarunui while I waited for the job to be done. There is an interesting little second-hand shop just off the Main Street down near the supermarket and I can easily kill half an hour exploring its nooks and crannies. I saw Bosch Season One sitting there and walked past it a couple of times but for $5 it was hard to pass up even if I expected it to be quite average.

I had thought that the developers of this series had attempted to squeeze each novel loosely into a single episode but exactly the opposite is the case. For Season One anyway, the ten episodes cover a single novel, in this case City of Bones. The story flows well and the character development is good, It has been a while since I read the book but the series rings true to my memories of it. This first season is based on the eighth novel in the series but then, I never read them in sequence so having a bit of a preview often adds some flavour to later exploring the pre-story. It is a little annoying that the first episodes contain a lot of, too many really, references to other Bosch novel titles in a rather heavy-handed way – not clever or subtle, just annoying but that novelty seems to have worn off by the third episode…

I thought that this was good enough to binge watch the ten episodes over two nights and am keen enough to watch it again to see what subtleties I may have missed on the first time through. It looks like three season have been made so far and I am keeping an eye out for the next two – hopefully Mighty Ape might take the hint from Season Two’s presence on my wishlist to dump it into the Daily Deals for me…

So, yes, Bosch on TV, Season One looks good, recommended, waiting for Season Two…