The Lincoln Lawyer: Summary and book reviews of The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly, plus links to an excerpt from The Lincoln Lawyer and a biography of Michael Connelly.
The Lincoln Lawyer
by Michael Connelly
Hardcover: Oct 2005,
416 pages.
Paperback: Jun 2006,
528 pages.
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."
The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley
Mickey Haller...is as cynical about the law as any of Grisham's lawyers, but
one doesn't sense that this cynicism is drawn out of the deep well of
experience that enriches Grisham's work. Still, if the best of Grisham's legal
novels grade in at a solid A, The Lincoln Lawyer gets an equally solid
B+, which isn't exactly bad for the first time out...it's not a pretty story,
but the world in which Mickey Haller works isn't a pretty place. Michael
Connelly knows it all too well and writes about it with chilling authority.
He's not a ';genre' novelist but the real thing, taking us into parts
of the real America that most of our novelists never visit because they don't
even know where, or what, they are.
The New York Times - Janet Maslin
The book is haunted by Mickey's worst nightmare: the thought of having to defend an innocent man. He starts out without the foggiest idea of what to do with someone like that. But by the end of the story an Honest Abe conscience has begun to kick in. That's when Mickey becomes a Connelly character through and through.
Library Journal - Jeff Ayers
Connelly...proves he can handle even the legal thriller
genre with this intricate and cynical look into the criminal justice system.
Kirkus Reviews
Contains everything readers have come to expect from powerhouse
Connelly.
Booklist - Allison Block
Starred Review. It has all the right stuff: a sinuous plot, crisp dialogue, and a roster of reprehensible characters.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Veteran bestseller Connelly enters the crowded legal thriller field with flash and panache.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by debbykc what a great read!!! What a fun book: Fast, quirky and a real page turner.
Rated of 5
by Elizabeth Excellent When I picked up the book I thought for sure they were going to be talking about an attorney that Abraham Lincoln used, and when I mention the book to others, they think the same thing.
But....the Lincoln is his car. :)
This book was the... Read More
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 Black Echo,
based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published in
1992, and later won the Edgar Award for best first novel by the Mystery Writers
of America. He followed up with three more Bosch books, The Black Ice,
The Concrete Blonde, and The Last Coyote, before publishing The
Poet, a...
As more and more killings are discovered, unraveling the maddening puzzle assumes a chilling new importance—stopping a vicious psychopath who's made cold-blood murder his chosen art form.
The suspense is breathtaking, the outcome never certain. A series that has garnered no end of awards -- the Edgar, the Shamus, the Philip Marlowe, the Maltese Falcon -- has ascended to a dizzying new height.
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The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley
of 5
by debbykc
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