Michael Connelly’s bestselling procedural series starring tough Los Angeles police detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch began with 1992’s The Black Echo and has spanned 25 volumes so far. The Waiting was published last year; in this latest entry, he’s been retired from the force for several years but helps out a younger detective, Renée Ballard, who heads the LAPD’s cold case unit. Some of Bosch’s adventures were already adapted in two popular streaming series starring Titus Welliver—Bosch (2014-2021) and Bosch: Legacy (2022-2025). Now Ballard, a new spinoff, is premiering July 9, with Maggie Q in the title role.

Ballard first appeared in The Late Show, a Kirkus-starred 2017 standalone in which she struggles after being sexually harassed by her sketchy supervisor in the Robbery-Homicide Division, Lt. Robert Olivas, earlier in her career. She’d filed a grievance against him, but her partner didn’t back her up; as a result, Olivas got away with his behavior, and Ballard’s own professional life took a significant hit. This background carries over to the new show, but the season is based mainly on a plotline from 2022’s Desert Star, in which Ballard heads up a new Open-Unsolved Unit, investigating old cases with a hardworking but second-tier team of volunteers and ex–law enforcement officers. Her top priority case involves Sarah Pearlman, a teenager who was raped and murdered in the ’90s; Pearlman’s brother, Jake, is currently a city councilmember. In the book, Ballard asks Bosch to volunteer with the cold case unit, which he does; in the show, she doesn’t, as she thinks he’s too much of a lone wolf—but he still pops in occasionally to help out. (Welliver and a few other Bosch regulars make cameos but largely stay out of the fray.)

This isn’t the only way that Ballard takes liberties with its source material. On the show, Ballard and Bosch barely know each other—they only worked one case together on a single Bosch: Legacy episode—while in Desert Star, they’re longtime colleagues. Ballard’s cold case team includes a new addition: Samira Parker (played by Shrinking’s Courtney Taylor), a former police officer who, as it happens, has a history with Olivas, just as Ballard does. As in the novel, the Pearlman case is revealed early on to be the work of serial killer, but the details of the investigation, and some of the characters, are quite different. The show also spends a good deal of time on a plotline involving corrupt cops, which provides some welcome suspense—a necessity on a cold case show, in which time is frequently not of the essence.

The streaming series, created by Major Crimes’ Michael Alaimo and Kendall Sherwood, makes good use of its LA setting, which is gorgeous and gritty, by turns, but viewers seeking a complex look at the LAPD will have to turn elsewhere. There are certainly some bad cops in the world of Ballard, but the show doesn’t grapple with that fact in any depth, nor is there ever much doubt as to whether good or evil will triumph in the end.

Maggie Q plays Ballard as a hard-driving workaholic who occasionally finds solace in surfing, and she does a creditable job. Her previous work—especially on the CW spy show Nikita (2010-2013) and the ABC/Netflix thriller series Designated Survivor (2016-2019)—was known for lively scenes of hand-to-hand combat. Disappointingly, there’s almost no action in Ballard, other than a brief chase in the first episode and a brutal fight later on, apparently inspired by a scene in 2021’s The Dark Hours. (At one point, Ballard recounts another tense moment to a colleague: “It got a little intense, but then the guy settled down”—a decent description of the show itself.)

Instead, the episodes largely concern themselves with the slow grind of police work, which, aside from a few twists, doesn’t always make for compelling television. It doesn’t help that the Open-Unsolved Unit is an uninspiring bunch, despite some fine work by John Carroll Lynch (Zodiac) as dependable veteran ex-cop Thomas Laffont and Seven Seconds’ Michael Mosley as the sometimes-unlikable reservist Ted Rawls. Noah Bean, who once co-starred with Maggie Q on Nikita, also finds unexpected layers in his politician character. Overall, the series may interest longtime Connelly fans, but there’s just too much downtime to maintain interest for newcomers; it’s a cold case show that may well get a frosty reception.

David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.