Does the Lincoln Lawyer Have a Fool for a Client?
When The Law of Innocence came out in 2020, I was excited. Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller books were the first of his books I’d read, and we hadn’t gotten a new book focused on him for multiple years at that point. However, since I was going through all of Michael Connelly’s books in publication order by that point, it’s taken me until just now to get to it.
This series is the author’s legal thrillers, and Mickey is a defense lawyer. While this is officially book six in the series, Mickey has shown up in several of the Harry Bosch books, and Bosch plays a role in this book. It’s why I went back to the beginning so I could truly follow these relationships. Additionally, this plot is more of a direct sequel to an earlier Mickey Haller book. No, I’m not going to name the book since that would spoil things in both books. So, I don’t recommend jump in here.
Mickey is heading home after celebrating a rare win one night when he is pulled over. He’s only annoyed until the cop starts insisting that he needs to open the trunk on Mickey’s car. When he does, he finds a dead body inside. While the victim was one of Mickey’s former clients, he hadn’t had contact with the man for several years. Booked on murder charges, Mickey must win the case of his career. But a not guilty won’t be good enough. He needs to prove he is innocent to restore his reputation. With his usual team behind him, can he do it?
That premise has intrigued me since I first heard about it, and the book wastes little time jumping into the story. Needless to say, I was hooked right away, and I didn’t find the book suffered too much from pacing. There were plenty of twists, setbacks, and revelations to keep me entertained. I always had a hard time when it was time to stop.
As much as I have enjoyed these books starring Mickey in the past, I have been bothered by them at times. With this book, I think I figured out a reason why. In order for us to get the maximum legal thrills, the prosecution and police need to become dumb. They are constantly doing the worst things they can do. Yes, it complicates things for Mickey, but could they not possibly see they are missing some key things? I’ve often said that the only way I can win Chess is if my opponent does the worst possible thing for him or her every move, and that’s what this felt like. Now, maybe I noticed this because we didn’t have a client to complicate Mickey’s life here, so we had to focus a bit more on the prosecution and detectives than we normally would. And, since we knew Mickey hadn’t done it, maybe that made their actions that much stupider. Still, these characters felt more like strawmen than real characters.
I also found Mickey’s complaints about the tricks the prosecution plays in building their case a bit hypocritical, something that often bothers me in the series since he does his best to hide things as well.
On the other hand, it was great to see Mickey and his team again. We haven’t seen much of his supporting characters since his last starring novel. It may have been a few years, but I felt right back at home with all of them.
Having said that, I do wish Michael Connelly would learn how to write a decent romance for any of his characters. The constant yo-yo is getting old in all his books. It makes it hard to root for anyone to get together since you know it won’t last.
As I said at the outset, this novel came out back in 2020 – the second half of the year, to be specific. That’s important since the novel is set in the very early parts of 2020. And yes, the novel does work in several things going on, most notably the start of Covid. While I did feel some of the political jabs were uncalled for in this setting, I did find the coming pandemic to add to the pressure Mickey was under. He might not know he had to win his case by a certain time, but we did.
As can sometimes happen in the books in this series, a couple of things were left dangling. No, it wasn’t lazy writing, they were addressed as unresolved as things wound down. I’m not quite used to that in most of the books I read, but it felt realistic to me in this case.
And yes, this book does have a bit more language than most of what I read, but not an excessive amount.
Since Michael Connelly is one of my audio authors, I got to enjoy Peter Giles’s narration again. He does a great job, especially in the court room scenes, which feature lots of back and forth, often without a bunch of dialogue tags. Yet, I always knew who was speaking. And he incorporates the right amount of acting without overpowering the words.
Yes, The Law of Innocence was worth the wait. While I noticed flaws, they didn’t hamper my overall enjoyment of this tense legal thriller.
Be sure to settle in for the rest of the Mickey Haller books.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for stopping by. In order to combat spam, I moderate most comments. I'll get to your comment as soon as I can.