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Loading... The Lincoln Lawyer (edition 2007)by Michael Connelly (Author)
Work InformationThe Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. My first MC Mickey Haller novel. Long and slow to start it picked up the pace with a well paced ending with surprises. A mixture of the first two TV seasons I heard MGRulfo's voice narrating the story. Not a lot of action but eenough suspense to keep it interesting. I look forward to the book where both Bosch and Haller work together. ( ) In my recent discovery of the works of Michael Connelly, through his Harry Bosch series, I became acquainted with his other successful saga featuring defense lawyer Mickey Haller: just like it happened with Bosch, I “met” Haller first in his cinematic version with the movie The Lincoln Lawyer and then through the more recent Netflix series with the same title. Jumping from screen to book was indeed a given for me, and the narrative links between the two book series made me often think of another successful TV show, Law and Order, with Bosch representing the “Law” side of the story and Haller taking the “Order” role through the intriguing courtroom scenes which are the backbone of the story and that appeal to me even more than police procedurals. Mickey Haller is a defense attorney nicknamed “The Lincoln Lawyer” because he prefers to do all his work aboard a Lincoln Town Car, while his driver shuttles him all over Los Angeles between the courtrooms and the prisons - yes because Mickey’s clientele mostly comes from the lower strata of society: biker gangs, small-time offenders, prostitutes and so on. He’s well-known in those circles for being the kind of lawyer who often manages to acquit his clients, or when that doesn’t work, to get them a reduced sentence. He works with quantity rather than quality, and is always looking for the “coup” that might present him with some financial stability, which he sorely needs given that he has two ex-wives - one of them a prosecutor he often meets while touring courtrooms and the other presently working as his case manager - and a hillside house with a great view, which he’s still paying for. So, when one of his many contacts presents him with the potential for a “franchise client”, the kind of client who promises steady income over the years, he does not look too closely into this proverbial gift horse’s mouth, hardly wondering why affluent Louis Roulet wanted someone like Haller to defend him against the accusation of having savagely beaten a prostitute. Roulet looks and sounds innocent - something of a change given Haller’s usual clientele - but some inconsistencies in the course of the investigation compel the lawyer to look closely at the evidence and bring him to a devastating discovery, one that forces him to navigate the extremely narrow margin between his commitment as an attorney and his conscience. By now I know that Michael Connelly’s writing never fails to engage me, but with this novel I was even more intrigued than usual, to the point that I did something I rarely - if ever - do: I read the first three books in the series back to back, and I not only avoided any kind of “story fatigue”, but I ended up feeling eager to continue with the series. Hook, line and sinker, indeed… What I found fascinating, besides the story itself, is the dichotomy between Haller’s outwardly sleazy persona and his own ethics, a divide that creates a multi-faceted, quite humanly believable character. He is a man very focused on his work and somehow haunted by the ghost of his father, a famous lawyer whose professional shadow he keenly feels, even though the man died when Mickey was still a child. I’m indulging in a little spoiler here, because it’s not a major one: Haller and Bosch are half brothers from that father’s side (something that I already knew thanks to my searches about Connelly’s works, and that is revealed in the second novel), and it’s interesting here to look for the two men’s points of contact and differences - despite the opposing sides of the law in which they work, they are both quite committed to their profession, to the point that both of them have sacrificed emotional entanglements to pursue that drive, but where Bosch is his very own man, forced from early childhood to depend only on himself, Haller often feels the weight of that larger-than-life father and the unconscious need to be “worthy” of his legacy. In the end, both men are striving for justice, each in his own different way and through totally different means, and I’m certain that the juxtaposition of these two characters will offer many intriguing considerations down the road. In this first Lincoln Lawyer novel, Michael Connelly fuses very successfully characterization and plot, creating an engrossing story that quite deserves the title of “page turner”: once again I came to the written word after experiencing the plot through the cinematic medium, and yet I was never bored or distracted by that knowledge because this is the kind of writer who knows how to capture his audience’s attention and keep it riveted from start to finish. Here the mix of courtroom debate, police investigation and unexpected twists and turns takes the readers through a story that is more than a simple legal thriller because it also explores, very compellingly, the nooks and crannies of the human soul while it showcases the intricacies of the legal system in a way that is everything but pedantic. It’s true that my TBR hardly needed another book series to weigh it down, but this new addition promises to offer many hours of absorbing reading, so I will not complain…. ;-) There are two ways to look at this novel - as part of the long running Harry Bosch Universe or as a separate independent novel. Neither of these will be wrong - while some characters from the main sequence show up, the novel stands on its own - just like the earlier "Blood Work" or "The Poet" did. In some ways, these first novels in the peripheral series are actually more enjoyable than the police procedurals in the main one. Mickey Haller is a lawyer in Los Angeles - jaded, not very well paid and ready to cross almost any line if it will help him (and peripherally his client - although that is almost never his priority). And out of the blue he gets his hands on a case which may be his meal ticket for awhile. Except that that meal ticket, Louis Roulet, seems to be a thoroughly unpleasant man. Which usually would not be an issue for Mickey - except that he had advised a previous client to plead guilty -- for a crime which now Louis looks good for. At the start of the novel, Mickey looks almost the opposite of Bosch (and if you had read the earlier novels, that is very obvious - none of them perfect but Mickey seems to be too self-centered). But as the novel progresses, it turns out that there is a morality under all that jadedness - he has his own moral compass and even he has a breaking point. It is not a tale of redeeming a fallen lawyer or of a lawyer finding again why he went into the profession. While the Mickey of the end of the novel is different from the one at the start, the change is more of a normal human reconsideration of his choices than a full blown discovery of a new path. Add to that a pretty decent thriller around the whole red herrings and more crime coming into it and the novel is a mix of a courtroom drama and a thriller that manages to find the correct ratio of the mix to keep it entertaining. If you had never read Connelly before, this is not a bad novel to start with -- but it may give you a bad idea of what you usually get from one of his novels. There is a lot that is recognizable but the character arc of Mickey is very different from any others in his oeuvre up to this point. Reading the novel almost 20 years after it came out means that I knew some things about it - including who Mickey Haller's half brother is. It is irrelevant to this novel and it will come into play in later novels but it was fun to see some elements from the older novels showing up in the periphery. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to SeriesHarry Bosch Universe (15) Lincoln Lawyer (1) Mickey Haller (1) Belongs to Publisher SeriesIs contained inHas the adaptationIs abridged inAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
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Thriller.
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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