Product Description

A New York Times Bestselling Author

New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly delivers his first legal thriller - an incendiary tale about a cynical defense attorney whose remaining spark of integrity may cost him his life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2697212 in Books
• Published on: 2005-12
• Formats: Audiobook, Unabridged
• Number of items: 10
• Binding: Audio CD

Amazon.com Review
Best-selling author Michael Connelly, whose character-driven literary mysteries have earned him a wide following, breaks from the gate in the over-crowded field of legal thrillers and leaves every other contender from Grisham to Turow in the dust with this tightly plotted, brilliantly paced, impossible-to-put-down novel.

Criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller's father was a legendary lawyer whose clients included gangster Mickey Cohen (in a nice twist, Cohen's gun, given to Dad then bequeathed to his son, plays a key role in the plot). But Dad also passed on an important piece of advice that's especially relevant when Mickey takes the case of a wealthy Los Angeles realtor accused of attempted murder: "The scariest client a lawyer will ever have is an innocent client. Because if you [screw] up and he goes to prison, it'll scar you for life."

Louis Roulet, Mickey's "franchise client" (so-called becaue he's able and willing to pay whatever his defense costs) seems to be the one his father warned him against, as well as being a few rungs higher on the socio-economic ladder than the drug dealers, homeboys, and motorcycle thugs who comprise Mickey's regular case load. But as the holes in Roulet's story tear Mickey's theory of the case to shreds, his thoughts turn more to Jesus Menendez, a former client convicted of a similar crime who's now languishing in San Quentin. Connelly tellingly delineates the code of legal ethics Mickey lives by: "It didn't matter...whether the defendant 'did it' or not. What mattered was the evidence against him--the proof--and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt." But by the time his client goes to trial, Mickey's feeling a few very reasonable doubts of his own.

While Mickey's courtroom pyrotechnics dazzle, his behind-the-scenes machinations and manipulations are even more incendiary in this taut, gripping novel, which showcases all of Connelly's literary gifts. There's not an excess sentence or padded paragraph in it--what there is, happily, is a character who, like Harry Bosch, deserves a franchise series of his own. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Veteran bestseller Connelly enters the crowded legal thriller field with flash and panache. Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller regularly represents lowlifes, but he's no slickster trolling for loopholes in the ethics laws. He's haunted by how he mishandled the case of (probably innocent) Jesus Menendez, and, though twice divorced, he's on good terms with his ex-wives; one of them manages his office, and the other, an ambitious assistant DA, occasionally tumbles back into bed with him. When Mickey signs on to defend young real estate agent Louis Roulet against charges of assault, he can't help seeing dollar signs: Roulet's imperious mother will spend any amount to prove her beloved son's innocence. But probing the details of the case, Mickey and private investigator Raul Levin dig up a far darker picture of Roulet's personality and his past. Levin's murder and a new connection to the Menendez case make Mickey wonder if he's in over his head, and his defense of Roulet becomes a question of morality as well as a test of his own survival. After Connelly spends the book's first half involving the reader in Mickey's complex world, he thrusts his hero in the middle of two high-stakes duels, against the state and his own client, for heart-stopping twists and topflight storytelling. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Michael Connelly is as scary as any of the plots he devises, which is saying something. In mid-May of this year, he published The Closer, the latest novel in his continuing series about LAPD detective Harry Bosch, 400 pages of intelligent, scrupulously researched, witty and smoothly written drama from which it was almost impossible to tear oneself away. Now here it is the second Sunday in October, and, incredibly, Connelly is back, with another 400 pages of exactly the same as above, except that this time around he's writing -- for the first time -- about lawyers, which, as it turns out, he does almost as well as John Grisham does.

Almost but not quite. Grisham has been in the law his entire working life, and he knows it with an intimacy that, among contemporary American novelists, only Scott Turow can match. Connelly is a reformed journalist who covered crime in two places that have plenty of it, Florida and Los Angeles, so he knows the law more as an observer than as a participant. Mickey Haller, the protagonist of The Lincoln Lawyer, 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.

Plainly and simply, Connelly always knows what he's doing. His prose is clean and from time to time betrays a hint of passion. His characters are invariably believable and, where appropriate, sympathetic, sometimes against type. He knows Los Angeles inside and out and evokes it with such verisimilitude that you can't help thinking of Raymond Chandler. His plots are intricate and sometimes tricky, but I've yet to find a significant hole in any of them. He obviously enjoys what he's doing (he'd have to, to publish two novels in a single year), and he conveys that to his readers, a rare gift in any writer.

"Lincoln lawyer"? Another phrase for it would be "ambulance chaser." Mickey Haller has an office in the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, a half-page ad in the Los Angeles Yellow Pages, and his phone number blaring forth "on 36 bus benches scattered through high-crime areas in the south east county." His "rate schedule . . . starts with a $5,000 flat fee to handle a DUI and ranges to the hourly fees I charge for felony trials." His phone is answered by his second ex-wife, Lorna Taylor, who is his case manager. His first ex-wife and mother of his only child, a daughter, is Margaret McPherson, known around the Van Nuys courthouse as Maggie McFierce, "one of the toughest and, yes, fiercest deputy district attorneys."

Of course, Maggie can't prosecute a case if she has a personal relationship with the defense attorney, which suits Mickey just fine when a bail bondsman steers him to what may just be the first "franchise client" he's had in almost two years:

"Every attorney who works the machine has two fee schedules. There is schedule A, which lists the fees the attorney would like to get for certain services rendered. And there is schedule B, the fees he is willing to take because that is all the client can afford. A franchise client is a defendant who wants to go to trial and has the money to pay his lawyer's schedule A rates. From first appearance to arraignment to preliminary hearing and on to trial and then appeal, the franchise client demands hundreds if not thousands of billable hours. He can keep gas in the tank for two to three years. From where I hunt, they are the rarest and most highly sought beast in the jungle."

Louis Roulet, 32 years old, the son of a wealthy self-made real-estate operator, handsome and self-confident, looks for all the world like a franchise client. He's been arrested in the apartment of Regina Campo, 26, an actress wannabe who's slipped down the slope to prostitution. He meets her in a bar, they size each other up, she names a price of $400 and tells him to be at her apartment at 10 p.m. Soon after he gets there, though, strange and violent things happen. When the police arrive, Reggie has blood all over herself, and the left side of her face is badly battered. Louis is on the floor, held there by two men who live nearby, with blood all over his left hand; soon a bloody knife is found with his initials on it. The cops run him in, and he's soon before a judge on charges of attempted rape and attempted murder. His mother and her society lawyer make it plain that money isn't a problem, so when Maggie has to quit the case Mickey is hugely relieved: The franchise looks as if it's in for a huge payday.

Cynical? You bet. Mickey is the son of a famous defense lawyer whom he hardly knew -- he was the unexpected offspring of a second marriage, and his father died when Mickey was 5 -- but from whom he inherited a powerful case of the legal hots. Any ideals or illusions he cherished while young have vanished: "The law school notions about the virtue of the adversarial system, of the system's checks and balances, of the search for truth, had long since eroded like the faces of statues from other civilizations. The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation. . . . Much of society thought of me as the devil but they were wrong. I was a greasy angel. I was the true road saint. I was needed and wanted. By both sides. I was the oil in the machine. I allowed the gears to crank and turn. I helped keep the engine of the system running."

The people whom Mickey represents are mostly guilty: drug dealers, drunk drivers, petty criminals, hard cases. He usually gets them off or gets them much lighter sentences and penalties than they really deserve. He's so accustomed to guilt that when Roulet declares his innocence passionately, angrily and persuasively, Mickey finds himself at sea: "I was always worried that I might not recognize innocence. The possibility of it in my job was so rare that I operated with the fear that I wouldn't be ready for it when it came. That I would miss it." He thinks he's found just such a client in Roulet, and he doesn't quite know how to handle it. As he tells Raul Levin, the private investigator who often works for him, "If I had only known it this morning, I would have charged him the innocent man premium. If you're innocent you pay more because you're a hell of a lot more trouble to defend."

That's only the beginning of it. Something about the Roulet case puts Mickey in mind of Jesus Menendez, who, facing charges eerily similar to those confronted by Roulet, took an early plea on Mickey's advice because, though Menendez insisted on his innocence, Mickey thought the evidence against him was irrefutable. Now Menendez is in San Quentin. Mickey visits him there, where Menendez "looked at me with eyes as dead as the gravel stones out in the parking lot." He shows Menendez some pictures, and the prisoner's response tells him at once "that Jesus Menendez had been innocent. Something as rare as a true miracle -- an innocent man -- had come to me and I hadn't recognized it. I had turned away."

So now Mickey has two missions: to defend his client and to get Menendez out of San Quentin. Now, too, is the moment when it's up to you to find out what happens and how, because from here on out the story belongs strictly to Connelly. Suffice it to say that events conspire to force Mickey, in the words of a Tupac Shakur song, "to be a man in this wicked land." He does get more or less what he wants, something approximating justice, but it's at a high price, and he hasn't recovered from the labor of it as the novel ends. What happens in those final pages, as well as all the pages leading up to them, has the ring of truth. 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.

Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Exactly what you would expect from Michael Connelly.
Abraham Lincoln is revered by lawyers everywhere for his courtroom skills and practical wisdom. The Lincoln Michael Connelly refers is not Abraham, but rather the automobile.

Mickey Haller, son of an original Los Angeles superstar lawyer, owns several. At times the limousine business seems preferable to his own. But finally he gets, to his eternal regret the "franchise case", the kind of case that not only pays the bills but causes other clients to want his services.

A young rich real estate broker is charged in the attempted murder of a hooker. His insistence in his innocence causes Haller to realize he may have what he has always dreaded, the actually innocent client. But he finds his defense efforts in disarray as the case sours, and he himself becomes a murder suspect.

Non-lawyers usually do not write good legal thrillers. Michael Connelly, a former reporter and America's best mystery writer, is the exception that proves the rule. He has a great ear for the courtroom and a sense of the professional and economic dilemmas trial lawyers face.

I will say this, however, in real life no matter how secret the client confidence, lawyers are ethically able to access the expertise necessary to know how to respond to any dilemma in an ethically sound way. The real Mickey Haller would have picked up the phone to the Bar's hotline for an ethics opinion. That simple act would have destroyed a helluva tale.

I hope we will see more of Haller. He has his demons but he is not as dark a protagonist as Harry Bosch. The reality is, in his first legal thriller, Connelly has produced a book every bit as good as John Grisham's A Time To Kill. That is saying a lot.

A Vintage Michael Connelly Story
This novel is definitely on a par with the best of the fifteen stories in Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series; any initial disappointment that might be experienced by Bosch's fans when they discover that Connelly has at least temporarily abandoned Harry in favor of Mickey Haller, a criminal defense attorney whose seemingly guilty clients often benefit from police errors, will almost immediately be replaced by the recognition that Connelly has created another character at least as complex and interesting as Harry. Mickey's persona is almost the opposite of Harry's, for him the law is about the art of the possible, his clients are often individuals who are down on their luck and on the wrong side of the law. Harry concentrates on identifying the guilty in order to provide justice for the victims and their families; Mickey is afraid that some day he will be hired to defend a client whose innocence he will be incapable of recognizing and thus he will simply pursue the "best deal" as opposed to throwing all his effort into gaining a "not guilty" verdict.

The story opens with Mickey receiving a telephone call from Fernando Valenzuela (no, not the pitcher, but the bail bondsman) in his office while on his way to a court hearing for Harold Casey, a member of the Road Saints motorcycle gang who is awaiting trial on multiple drug and weapons charges. (The Lincoln Town Car which is his office is an integral element both in his life and also eventually becomes an important detail in the particular case which is at the center of this story.) Valenzuela alerts Mickey to the possibilty of a potential "franchise case", a big money case involving a high profile client who has been booked for aggravated assualt, gross bodily injury, and attempted rape and who is interested in having Mickey represent him. As Mickey investigates the case, he quickly decides that his defense of Louis Roulet, a Beverly Hills real estate salesman, will be one of the easiest cases of his career and in fact it may never even get to trial and thus deprive him of both the big payday and the publicity which he had hoped to receive. Several unexpected twists quickly occur, and when one of Mickey's good friends is murdered he realizes that instead of worrying about failing to recognize innocence when it confronts him, for the first time in his career he may instead be in mortal danger from the pure evil which is apparently behind the attack for which his client is on trial. All this is foreshadowed wonderfully very early in the book by the following brief injection of Mickey's mental commentary (the story is written entirely in the first person);

"Much of society thought of me as the devil but they were wrong. I was a greasy angel. I was the true road saint. I was needed and wanted. By both sides. I was the oil in the machine. I allowed the gears to crank and turn. I helped keep the engine of the system running.

But all of that would change with the Roulet case. For me. For him. And certainly for Jesus Menendez."

And during the rest of the story, as Mickey defends Roulet and we gradually discover who Jesus Menendez is and his relevance to this case, we watch the juxtaposition of guilt and innocence and the clash of good and evil as the assumptions at the heart of Mickey's existence are threatened. As the title of Part Two so deftly summarizes , Mickey has entered " a world without truth."

We also are gradually introduced to the important people in Mickey's life - his dead father (a lengendary defense attorney), his two ex-wives (both with central roles in this story) and the young daughter who he has neglected due to the press of his caseload. As the book proceeds, Connelly's meticulous research provides the reader with the same type of interesting detail regarding the legal system which the Bosch series provided regarding police procedures. (And as a bonus, Connelly's knowledge of detective work makes that aspect of this story very realistic.) Furthermore, the explicit and implicit observations about human nature and the human condition which are embedded throughout THE LINCOLN LAWYER added immensely to my enjoyment of the story. Several of Mickey's small time clients not only prove essential to the Roulet case as it unfolds but are intesting in their own right.

So this book is highly recommended, both for Michael Connelly fans and as an introduction to his work for new readers. Whether Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller eventually meet or the two series remain on totally independent tracks, It appears that the author has created interesting enough characters to form the basis for many future bestsellers. For the past several years my favorite legal procedurals are the series created by John Lescroart involving lawyer Dismas Hardy and detective Abraham Glitsky. These novels successfully combine background case development and courtroom drama with truly interesting characters (Abe, Diz and their associates, friends and families) whose lives are an integral element in the stories. This book is on a par with the best stories in that series, and should be very enjoyable for fans of both Connelly and Lescroart and in fact for all readers of legal thrillers.

Tucker Andersen

The best yet from Michael Connelly
I have long been a fan of Michael Connelly. As far as I'm concerned Connelly is in the top five of modern-day mystery writers. With each book I say to myself that "he just can't top this one." And I continue to be wrong. And The Lincoln Lawyer is no exception. It just has to be the absolute best Michael Connelly novel ever!

Criminal defense attorney, Mickey Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer; meaning he works out of the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car. He's never sure if he would be able to recognize innocence if it stood in front of him. And he's not necessarily concerned whether his clients are innocent or not.

A wealthy Beverly Hills realtor is arrested for attacking a woman in her home. This type of client is what Mick Haller calls a 'franchise case.' It's a big payday and the case appears to be an easy one. But after someone close to Mick is murdered, things become murky before they clear up. Mick is facing down pure evil and he'd better be at the top of his game if he wishes to get out of this case alive.

Armchair Interviews says: The Lincoln Lawyer has everything; great characters, scintillating plot, action, evil, gritty issues, ex-wives and a hero who is unlikely. It is a 15 on a score of one to ten!