Meet Harry Bosch, (Fictional) Great American Veteran

Michael Connelly's fictional LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch is a man on a mission, one fueled by combat experiences during his service in the U.S. Army.

Over the course of nearly three decades, Bosch has pursued his mantra of "everybody counts or nobody counts" to solve murders of the poor and forgotten with the same intensity that the rest of the force applies to capturing the killers of the rich and famous.

Aside from his starring role in Connelly's best-selling novels, Bosch has enjoyed a successful run as the lead character in Amazon Prime's long-running series "Bosch." Based on the first five episodes of season six, the new series (debuting Friday, April 17) will be one of the show's best.

Hieronymus (Harry) Bosch made his debut in Connelly's first novel, "The Black Echo," in 1992. Back then, he was an Army veteran who'd served as a tunnel rat with the 1st Infantry Division during the Vietnam War. Bosch crawled into North Vietnamese-dug tunnels, collected intelligence, planted C-4 explosives and killed any Viet Cong who crossed his path.

LAPD detective Bosch is scarred by his war experiences and the memory of his mother, a Hollywood street prostitute who was murdered when he was 11. Over the character's first decade in the books, he puts together the pieces that solve his mother's cold case and connects with his half-brother Mickey Haller, a hotshot defense attorney with whom he shares a father.

The character has enjoyed a wild ride over 22 Bosch novels, nearly a dozen short stories and guest appearances in five of Connelly's Mickey Haller novels. He's quit the force, come back, been forced into retirement and worked as a part-time investigator for one of Southern California's small-town police forces. He's now retired and working old cases in conjunction with LAPD detective Renée Ballard, a new main character that Connelly introduced in 2017.

The Harry Bosch who lives in the books is 70 years old this year. He probably doesn't have that much time left to work cases in any capacity. Hollywood was very interested in making Bosch movies back in the 1990s, but nothing ever quite worked out.

When Amazon Prime Video decided to give Connelly a chance to tell the Bosch story the way he wanted back in 2015, the author had to do something about the character's age to be able to have the show be a believable one.

TV Bosch is a veteran of the first Gulf War. He served on a Special Forces team that cleared tunnels but, as any Vietnam tunnel rat will tell you, that duty didn't quite compare to what Novel Bosch experienced. TV Bosch also reenlisted in the Army after 9/11 and did a year's worth of tunnel duty in Afghanistan.

The series did a good job of recycling plots from the novels, usually combining the mysteries from two separate books and freely shuffling the timeline. Bosch's partner Jerry Edgar and Chief Irvin Irving became much bigger (and quite different) characters in the TV version of the story, but Connelly and his fellow writers and producers have kept a firm grip on what makes the books so compelling and done an excellent job of transferring that to television.

The series suffered a dropoff in season 5, focusing on a drug trafficking story pulled from what might be the final Bosch solo novel, 2017's "Two Kinds of Truth." In the novel, the undercover mission cost Bosch his position with the San Fernando Police Department. TV Bosch keeps his job, but both the novel and series lack the series' greatest strength: A focus on the dark internal politics of power in Los Angeles.

It's Bosch's rage against that machine that's kept the series strong over the decades and, fortunately, the new season seems to have reconnected with that sense of purpose. Based on the novels "The Overlook" (2007) and "Dark Sacred Night" (2018), the new episodes weave the competing plotlines together with a greater ease than the show has managed in even its best seasons.

"Bosch" sits somewhere on the scale between "Law & Order" and "True Detective." It's more intense than network television but never as demanding as one of those overly elaborate HBO shows. The team behind Amazon's "Jack Ryan" series learned some lessons from "Bosch," and the two shows share that "just challenging enough" DNA.

The show will wrap up with season seven, hopefully sometime next year, if production is able to resume in the next few months. In the meantime, "Bosch" returns with one of its best series to date. Get to know this LAPD detective on a mission.

Breaking news: Michael Connelly has announced a "Bosch" spinoff series called "Detective Coltrane." See the trailer below.