SPLIT SCREEN

There’s a new sheriff in town—and that makes all the difference to Det. Eve Ronin, of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department.

Very few people are sorry, or even all that surprised, when Juliette Winter is found naked and dead in her bathroom. The former child star had been on the skids for years, and it was only a matter of time before her addiction to drink and drugs caught up with her. It’s much more surprising when Dr. Ryan Massey, of Calabasas Oaks Health Partners, is bashed to death with a baseball bat, though this time a pair of obvious suspects—his prickly ex-wife, Mira Jurek, and Toby Keeling, her boyfriend, who’s basically still a boy—are seen fleeing the scene. When Eve unwisely drops in to the wrap party for the first season of the TV show based on her exploits, her estranged father, Vince Nyby, asks her to find out where another one of his daughters—Lauren Robinson, a daughter Eve hadn’t even known about—has gotten all the money she’s been flaunting. Worst of all, Sheriff Waylon Gifford, the LASD’s new head, forces Eve to publicly endorse his leadership and to allow Erin Casey, who plays her on Ronin, to follow her around, even to murder scenes. The caseload is so varied and so generous that the whole menu sounds like J.J. Marric’s early George Gideon procedurals relocated to Southern California—except that every one of Eve’s tasks comes with unexpected twists, from complications that claim new murder victims to the surprising ways some of them turn out to be connected to each other.

A four-course banquet that strikes just the right balance between closure and open-endedness.