Renée Ballard (Maggie Q) joins Harry Bosch (Titus Welliver) in the final episode of Bosch: Legacy (Photo: Patrick Wymore/Prime Video)

Crime writer Michael Connelly has reassured fans that Titus Welliver will continue to play legendary detective Harry Bosch on screen, even as the longest-running streaming series in television history ends after its 10th season this spring.

Despite an energetic grassroots campaign to save the show, Bosch: Legacy will still end 11 years after its final series in March. But Welliver, 62, will continue to play the law-breaking cop in Connelly’s untitled new series, with Maggie Q as Renée Ballard.

Based on Detective Mitzi Roberts, the real-life head of the LAPD’s volunteer unit, Ballard has been sharing book storylines with Bosch since 2017’s The Late Show, and the pair are set to appear together for the sixth time in Connelly’s new blockbuster, The Late Show. Wait, more shortly. While expressing gratitude for the “very flattering” fan-led campaign to save Bosch: Legacy, which premiered after seven seasons of the Amazon Prime original Bosch, Connelly said, “It’s hard for me to argue against having 10 seasons of Bosch.

“When I was shooting the first episode of season one, I remember asking Titus, ‘If we’re lucky enough to get five seasons, can you do five seasons?’ And he said, ‘I’ll do it as long as you want me to.’ But it turned out to be 10 seasons, which was amazing. And Titus is on the upcoming Ballard show, just like they worked together in the book.”

“We didn’t understand that Bosch: Legacy wouldn’t continue until we had a successful Ballard production, but that freed up some of our Bosch characters. So I think there will be some surprise appearances in the future.”

While many authors have had a strained relationship with film and television – fans of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, for example, never enjoyed the two Tom Cruise films, despite later embracing Alan Ritchson in a TV role – Connelly’s most beloved novels have received overwhelmingly positive reviews for their screen adaptations.

Season three of The Lincoln Lawyer, starring Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as lawyer Mickey Haller, dropped on Netflix last week, and there’s another potential spinoff in the works featuring Bosch’s former m.urd3r partner, Jerry Edgar, played by Jamie Hector.

Connelly jokes, not without reason, that the MCU—or Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, with its dozens of interconnected characters and storylines, as it’s commonly known—could also represent “the Michael Connelly Universe.” “I think there’s an understanding in Hollywood that this stuff works, and that’s been to my advantage,” he says, eyes glinting.

Speaking from New York on the first leg of his latest US book tour, the 68-year-old crime writing legend is modestly confident that Hawaiian-born Designated Survivor and Nikita star Maggie Q, 45, will be a winner as surf-loving cop Renée Ballard. “I wasn’t as involved as I was with Bosch, but I was involved in the casting of Maggie,” he says.

“We’re filming the seventh of 10 episodes now so we’re really enjoying it and she’s absolutely brilliant on every level – people are going to love this show.

“I’m always hesitant to make predictions about my other series, so maybe it’s my level of experience now, but I feel sure we’ve succeeded here.

“Maggie reminds me a lot of Titus in her team effort. You’re only really good at being at the top of the call sheet, and she’s at the top of the show. I’ve seen the first five episodes, plus she’s on the last episode of Bosch: Legacy, so I knew we had the right Ballard, just like I knew we had the right Bosch. It was deja vu.”

As for the proposed Jerry Edgar series, Connelly added: “I don’t want to say it’s on hold but Amazon will see how Ballard does and then, hopefully, we’ll be able to bring Jerry back.”

Despite selling more than 74 million copies of his books and spawning two massive TV series, there’s no sign that Connelly is resting on his laurels.

He revealed that he was just “days away” from completing his next, as-yet-untitled novel.

Aspiring actress Elizabeth Short was dubbed the ‘Black Dahlia’ after her m.urd3r in 1947 (Photo: Bettmann Archives)

Set on Catalina Island – an hour’s boat ride off the southern California coast – the film will introduce a brand new character to the ever-expanding “MCU.”

“Catalina is under the jurisdiction of the LA County Sheriff and they have a lone detective working there. I wrote a short story about that detective once and I liked the idea,” he explains. “This isn’t the same person – this is a complete rethinking of it – but this is a book about the lone detective on Catalina.”

So a mysterious locked island? “Not really,” he smiles. “This guy is in LA for at least a third of the book looking for clues.” The story in question, Avalon, is part of a short story anthology published by the Mystery Writers of America, and has been proposed for adaptation, starring Scream’s Neve Campbell as Detective Nicole Searcy.

In a rare disappointment, the ABC network canceled the production without bringing it to television. Instead, Connelly and fellow producer David E Kelley adapted the Lincoln Lawyer books for Netflix, casting Campbell as Maggie McPherson, Mickey Haller’s hot-headed prosecutor ex-wife.

Waiting – Connelly loves titles with multiple meanings, this latest instalment deals with families yearning for justice and Ballard, the surfer, chasing the perfect wave – is another wonderfully gripping read, the work of a master storyteller whose creativity and pace are unparalleled in modern crime fiction.

Titus Welliver as Harry Bosh with his partner Jerry Edgar, played by Jamie Hector (Photo: Amazon Prime)

In Connelly’s 25th novel featuring Harry Bosch, his plots become more complex than ever. I wonder if this is just a reflection of his maturity as a writer, or a reaction to his television work?

“I think the mature part is right because it’s hard to weave all these Byzantine pieces together even though they’re more reflective of real life,” he said.

“No police detective is just working on one case at a time – they’re always spinning plates. It’s hard to do that without confusing the reader, and I think I’ve gotten better at it the more I write.”

That spinning of the dial is the key to the new book. In The Wait, the impact of a pebble—Ballard’s Land Rover Defender being hijacked while she was surfing—leads to a wave of action.

“I like the idea that from a small thing, something big happens. This book opens with Ballard being tricked and look where that leads,” Connelly smiles.

As she tries to retrieve her badge and gun, Ballard’s Open-Unsolved team tracks a serial sex offender known as the “Pillowcase Rapist” in a dramatic cold case. The story is based on a real-life sex offender in Florida, where Connelly grew up.

“Back in the 80s when I was a police reporter in Fort Lauderdale, there was a guy known as the Pillowcase Rapist,” he explains.

“It was not the age of mass media like the Internet but there was almost mass hysteria because there were more than 40 attacks in a very short period of time.

“He was never caught and disappeared. And then almost four decades later, this guy is caught and, of course, after taking DNA, they were able to identify his father as the Pillowcase Rapist.”

In fact, Robert Koehler, 64, who used pillowcases or other materials to suffocate his victims while attacking them, was eventually convicted last year of sexual assault, kidnapping and burglary thanks to advances in DNA technology.

“It was messy justice, it was unrequited justice,” Connelly continued. “It finally came, but it was too late. And the victims and their families have been dealing with that trauma for decades.”

Two intriguing subplots involve domestic terrorism — following the ongoing fallout in the United States following the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021 — and the efforts of the cold case unit’s newest volunteer, Harry’s cop daughter Maddie, to solve LA’s most notorious unsolved m.urd3r — that of 22-year-old good-time girl Elizabeth Short, AKA the “Black Dahlia,” whose gruesomely mutilated body was found in January 1947.

In real life, the case remains officially unresolved and controversial in LA.

“Mitzi Roberts, who until a few months ago ran the cold case unit, told me that not a week goes by that they don’t get a call from someone with a theory about black dahlias,” Connelly explains.

“It sits in the dark pantheon of LA m.urd3rs, all over the world. It was particularly brutal and bloody, and thinking about the psychology of the person who k!lled this poor woman, it haunts you. What I wanted to do – and this is probably giving too much away – was I wanted to solve the case by not solving it, so it remains LA’s greatest mystery.”

The wait in Michael Connelly’s new book (Photo: Orion Publishing)

You’ll have to read Waiting to find out, but even before the book hit UK bookstores, there were complaints from LA real-life crime enthusiasts. A website, ironically run by a former LA Times colleague of Connelly’s, accused him of contributing to the “folklore” surrounding the case. The author himself remains at ease.

“My response to critics: ‘Hey, this is a novel.’ I’ve spent more than 30 years writing novels about Los Angeles, and to avoid writing about it seemed like a hole. So now I’ve filled that hole.”

In fact, the case has influenced Connelly from the beginning, starting with LA author James Ellroy’s own best-selling novel, The Black Dahlia, partly inspired by the real-life, unsolved rape and m.urd3r of his own mother.

“The mentality seemed pretty clear: he [James Ellroy] has this terrible thing happen in his life, and he’s dealing with it by writing about m.urd3rs. And I just thought, ‘What about a guy with a similar story but solving m.urd3rs?’” Connelly said.

“That was one of Harry’s main motivations; the psychology of someone who had his mother taken away in such a brutal and unresolved way would be the driving force for his life – to become a detective who was drawn to cases involving women in a sympathetic way.”

The real-life Open-Unsolved Unit in LA, which has about 4,000 unsolved crimes on its books, is still closing cases, even if they haven’t caught the Black Dahlia killer yet.

“Mitzi Roberts is retired, but she continues to volunteer part-time,” Connelly said. “So she has never stopped pursuing justice.”

Sadly, because of its obvious importance to victims and families, the work of investigating cold cases often falls victim to the day-to-day work of direct prosecution and policing.

“No police department has enough bodies to cover everything,” Connelly said.

“So cold case work is often put on the back shelf. The previous LAPD chief was more interested in getting uniformed officers out on the streets to stop crime – being proactive rather than reactive – and how can you argue with that philosophy? But cold cases are important. The idea that people can get away with m.urd3r is not good for society.”

Connelly remains humble about his enormous success and longevity, adding: “It’s a wonderful cosmic gift that I’ve been given, but at the same time, I don’t want to appear cavalier.

“I have to treat it like something sacred and I can’t lower the bar, I have to raise it all the time and I have to write about serious things.”

Now, the Wait is Over. It’s another win.