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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Oct 2005, 416 pages
Paperback:
Jun 2006, 528 pages
Book Reviewed by:
BookBrowse Review Team
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A stunning display of novelistic mastery - as human, as gripping, and as whiplash-surprising as any novel yet from the writer Publishers Weekly has called "today's Dostoyevsky of crime literature.
Mickey Haller has spent all his professional life afraid that he
wouldn't recognize innocence if it stood right in front of him. But what he
should have been on the watch for was evil.
Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of
the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung
courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. Bikers, con artists,
drunk drivers, drug dealers - they're all on Mickey Haller's client list. For
him, the law is rarely about guilt or innocence - it's about negotiation and
manipulation. Sometimes it's even about justice.
A Beverly Hills playboy arrested for attacking a woman he picked up in a bar
chooses Haller to defend him, and Mickey has his first high-paying client in
years. It is a defense attorney's dream, what they call a franchise case. And as
the evidence stacks up, Haller comes to believe this may be the easiest case of
his career.
Then someone close to him is murdered and Haller discovers that his search
for innocence has brought him face-to-face with evil as pure as a flame. To
escape without being burned, he must deploy every tactic, feint, and instinct in
his arsenal - this time to save his own life.
The Lincoln Lawyer is a stunning display of novelistic mastery - as human, as
gripping, and as whiplash-surprising as any novel yet from the writer Publishers
Weekly has called "today';s Dostoyevsky of crime literature."
ONE
Monday, March 7
The morning air off the Mojave in late winter is as clean and crisp as
you'll ever breathe in Los Angeles County. It carries the taste of promise on
it. When it starts blowing in like that I like to keep a window open in my
office. There are a few people who know this routine of mine, people like
Fernando Valenzuela. The bondsman, not the baseball pitcher. He called me as I
was coming into Lancaster for a nine o'clock calendar call. He must have heard
the wind whistling in my cell phone.
"Mick," he said, "you up north this morning?"
"At the moment," I said as I put the window up to hear him better. "You
got something?"
"Yeah, I got something. I think I got a franchise player here. But his
first appearance is at eleven. Can you make it back down in time?"
Valenzuela has a storefront office on Van Nuys Boulevard a block from the
civic center, which includes two courthouses and the Van Nuys jail. He calls his
business Liberty Bail Bonds. His ...
Mickey Haller may represent lowlifes but, despite his clientele and his own facade of world-weariness, he maintains something of a conscience, triggered in part by a past case that he mishandled which landed a (probably) innocent man on Death Row. However, when he takes on the case of Louis Roulet, who is accused of beating a prostitute, the guilt or innocence of the man is secondary to the dollar signs that Haller sees in his future, because Roulet appears to be the ultimate prize for a lawyer - a 'franchise' client - i.e. one who will provide repeat business over the years; and as an added bonus there's a fighting chance that he's even telling the truth when he proclaims himself innocent!
Connelly spends about half the book introducing Haller's complex world, replete with a motley collection of ex-clients proficient in interesting and usually illegal areas of expertise, and a couple of ex-wives; and then launches him on a roller coaster ride complete with more than ample twists and turns.
With starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Booklist this is a must for legal thriller aficionados and for fans of Michael Connelly.
Interesting note for fans of Connelly's Harry Bosch series: Mickey Haller and Harry Bosch are half-brothers, sharing the same father, J. Michael Haller - which begs the question whether we'll see Haller and Bosch together in a future book?..continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing. After graduating in 1980, he worked at newspapers in Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. The resulting magazine story was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and landed him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. After three years on the crime beat, he began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The ...
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