“I just don’t know why you can’t have it both ways. You know, give unbridled effort in your defense but be conscientious about your work. Try for the best outcome.”

“The best outcome for who? Your client? Society? Or for yourself? Your responsibility is to your client and the law, Bullocks. That’s it.”

I gave her a long stare before continuing.

“Don’t go growing a conscience on me,” I said. “I’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead you to anything good.”

I’ve said before that, although I’m a big fan of Michael Connelly, I’m not a big Mickey Haller fan. Mickey, Connelly’s street-smart defense lawyer hero, is just a little shady. His aspirations are mostly monetary, or so he believes – though in the crunch he tends to learn he’s not quite the scoundrel he fancies himself.

I consider it a tribute to author Connelly’s storytelling skill that I found myself generally irritated with Mickey all the way to the end of The Fifth Witness, where a sudden reversal won me over completely.

When the story begins, Mickey has diverted his legal practice to a field currently more lucrative than criminal defense. That’s contesting mortgage foreclosures. Among his new clients, the most annoying is Lisa Trammel, who has turned her personal property fight into a crusade, and has started a protest movement. She’s pushy and entitled, and Mickey doesn’t like her at all.

But when Lisa is arrested for the murder (with a hammer) of a bank officer she’s been blaming for her troubles, she calls on Mickey to defend her. Sure, there’s blood DNA evidence to link her to the crime, but how did five foot three Lisa kill a man well over six feet tall with a hammer blow to the very top of his skull? And who sent thugs to beat Mickey up?

As he works through the evidence, Mickey begins to suspect he may actually be defending an innocent woman – something that troubles him more than an assumption of guilt would.

Very well done. Michael Connelly played on my emotions like a master all the way through.

Cautions for the usual, but nothing major by contemporary standards.

I wonder if the recent popularity surge of Scandinavian detective novels influenced Michael Connelly to add a Scandinavian element to his latest Harry Bosch novel, The Black Box. It doesn’t really matter. The Bosch series continues very strong, and I think the Scandinavians will like it for its own sake.

When Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch, Connelly’s most famous detective, first appeared in a novel, he was dealing with the chaos of the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. This story takes us back to that surreal time. There were so many murders that detectives weren’t able to do proper crime scene work. They got shunted from place to place, protected by the National Guard, with time only to take a few pictures and notes before calling the meat wagons and rushing off somewhere else.

One murder scene he visited that night has nagged at Harry ever since. It involved the body of a white woman, who “shouldn’t have been in that neighborhood” at all. In time she was identified as Anneke Jesperson, a Danish freelance reporter and photographer. Twenty years later, now working on the Unsolved Crimes squad, Harry takes the case up again. But he finds that his superiors are not only not enthusiastic about him opening the case, but openly obstructive – it would be bad politics to solve the murder of a white woman on the twentieth anniversary of the riots.

Harry doesn’t care. He plays hardball both with the brass and with his suspects. He’s willing to go without backup onto his enemies’ home ground in order to flush them out. I was a little worried about a somewhat clichéd plot element here, but I thought Connelly resolved it in a believable way.

The Harry Bosch series is one of the best police procedurals going today, and it shows no sign of flagging. Recommended, with cautions for violence, mature themes, and language.

The title of this Harry Bosch novel by Michael Connelly, The Drop, refers to a police department acronym for a special procedure for allowing a detective to stay on past mandatory retirement. Since Harry, an old Vietnam veteran, is already past that point, getting a further extension is important to him. His job is his life, or at least it was until his teenage daughter came to live with him.

Bosch felt a brief stirring in his gut. It was a mixture of instinct and knowing that there was an order of things in the world. The truth was revealed to the righteous. He often felt it at the moment things started to tumble together on a case.

When The Drop begins, Harry and his partner, who are on the cold case squad, are assigned to re-investigate a twenty year old rape-murder. DNA from a blood smear found on the body has been matched to a known sex offender. The only problem is that the offender was eight years old at the time the teenage victim was killed. Is it just an evidence mix-up, or something more complicated?

But they’ve hardly started the job before they’re called up by the Chief’s office to handle a current case. A lawyer, the son of Harry’s old nemesis, the political reptile Irvin Irving, has fallen – or jumped – from a balcony in a posh Beverly Hills hotel. It looks like suicide, but there are discrepancies. And Harry is soon following a trail that winds through the treacherous terrain of city and police politics – what ordinary cops call “high jingo.” Games are being played, and somebody is trying to use Harry for their own purposes.

Running through the story are themes of guilt, forgiveness, and redemption. Harry gets involved with a woman who is wracked by guilt and the question of where evil comes from. Harry deals with the same problem in dealing with a sexual predator who was himself a victim, and with several colleagues who betray his trust.

There’s a lot of serious matter in this story, and few answers beyond whodunnit. For mysteries, generally, it’s enough to raise the questions. I read The Drop with great pleasure.

Cautions for language and adult material.

I felt what Maggie had tried to describe to me on more than one occasion when we were married. She always called it the burden of proof. Not the legal burden. But the psychic burden of knowing that you stood as representative of all the people. I had always dismissed her explanations as self-serving. The prosecutor was always the overdog. The Man…. I never understood what she was trying to tell me.

Until now.

I still haven’t entirely warmed to Michael Connelly’s “Lincoln Lawyer” character, Mickey Haller, who strikes me as somewhat irresponsible (a useful quality, perhaps, in a criminal defense lawyer).

But The Reversal, “A Lincoln Lawyer” novel, is as much a story of Mickey’s half-brother, police detective Harry Bosch, as it is one of Mickey’s, so I had no problem getting on board. And the story as a whole seemed to me as engaging and sympathetic as Connelly has written in some time.

It begins with Mickey doing something he’s always sworn he’d never do—go to work (on a temporary basis) as a county prosecutor, making and presenting a case against a convicted child murderer. DNA evidence has won the convict a new trial, but the District Attorney’s office still believes they have the right man. The most important element of their case is the eyewitness, the victim’s older sister, who was only a child at the time.

Mickey agrees to do the job—just this once—on the condition that he gets his ex-wife, prosecutor Maggie MacPherson, as his associate. (He wants to improve his relationship with her.) With Harry Bosch as chief investigator, it makes the entire prosecution a family affair.

The narration switches back and forth from Mickey’s point of view (presented in the first person) and Harry’s (in the third person). The alternation makes an interesting counterpoint. Mickey is all about tactics and strategies, intuiting the Defense’s moves on the basis of his own considerable experience on that side of the courtroom. Meanwhile Harry runs down leads and dogs the suspect in his accustomed, obsessive way, his focus always on his duty (or vocation), as an officer of society itself, to see justice done and the evil removed from our midst.

This being fiction, of course, even the best courtroom strategist can’t foresee, or prevent, the big surprise that takes the story’s climax out of the safety of the courtroom and into the perils of a city full of innocent bystanders.

The Reversal is an excellent thriller from a master storyteller. Recommended for adults. Cautions for language and icky stuff.

Harry Bosch is not my favorite among Michael Connelly’s continuing characters. That honor goes to Terry McCaleb, whom Connelly killed off a few books back (McCaleb makes a welcome appearance in one of the stories in this book). But I appreciate Harry more than Connelly’s replacement for McCaleb, Micky Haller, the “Lincoln Lawyer.” Not that there’s anything much wrong with Haller. He’s just newer and (to all appearances) less damaged by life than the others. It’s the scars and calluses on the older characters that make them interesting to me.

Suicide Run is a collection of three short stories starring Harry (Hieronymus) Bosch, Los Angeles police detective. Warning: It’s a short collection. Much of the bulk of the book is taken up by a preview of Connelly’s next novel, The Drop. Since I never read such previews (they only frustrate me), I was a little disappointed in that.

But I enjoyed the stories nonetheless. In “Suicide Run,” Bosch investigates the murder of a beautiful Hollywood starlet, disguised as a suicide. In “Cielo Azul,” he goes to visit a killer on death row, in an attempt to persuade him to reveal the burial site of one of his victims. In “One Dollar Jackpot,” he tackles the murder of a famous female poker player, shot to death in her automobile.

The genius of the Harry Bosch stories, in my view (and in all Connelly’s work), is the compassion at their heart. Harry, like a character in a painting by the artist he was named after, lives in a world filled with horrors and apparent irrationality. Yet his personal vocation is to speak for the dead, to do them the last possible service through seeing that their killers pay the price.

For me, the outstanding story here was “Cielo Azul,” a bittersweet tale in which Harry goes on a seemingly hopeless quest to learn one truth before it’s too late. I don’t know what author Connelly believes about God or the afterlife, but he asks the right questions here, and that’s something.

Recommended for adults.

For a few years, mystery novelist Michael Connelly’s books bounced back and forth between two recurring main characters—Los Angeles detective Harry Bosch, and Terry McCaleb, retired FBI profiler. Sometimes both at once. But Connelly killed McCaleb off a few books back, and since then he seems to be casting about for a new regular series, mixing and matching characters in various combinations.

The Scarecrow appears to be an attempt to re-launch the adventures of crime reporter Jack McEvoy and FBI profiler Rachel Walling. They teamed up (as investigators and lovers) in a much earlier novel, The Poet, and Rachel also featured in a recent Harry Bosch book. But Connelly here drops big hints that he’s carving out a future for them as a team.

I applaud this, but wish they could have been re-launched in a slightly better book. Not that The Scarecrow is bad. It moves right along, and builds tension nicely, but I wouldn’t list it among Connelly’s best works. Of course, that’s a pretty high bar. Continue reading The Scarecrow, by Michael Connelly →

The Brass Verdict is Michael Connelly’s second novel about his new character, lawyer Mickey Haller. I wasn’t too sure whether I liked Mickey much when I read the first one, The Lincoln Lawyer, but this book definitely warmed me to him.

Mickey Haller is a defense attorney. He’s just coming off a one-year hiatus when he gets the news that an old friend, another defense lawyer named Jerry Vincent, has been murdered, and has left his stable of clients to him. One of them is a “franchise case,” a big-paycheck, high-profile case involving Walter Elliott, a Hollywood movie mogul.

There are problems with defense lawyers as heroes of stories. We all know that in the real world they’re not Perry Mason. They defend the worst people in the world, and if they’re good they get very rich off it. What makes Mickey Haller sympathetic is that he feels that moral tension, on a deep level. It probably had a lot to do with the cocaine-and-alcohol habit that destroyed his marriage, alienated his daughter, and nearly cost him his life.

On moving into Jerry’s office, Mickey finds two policeman going through the case files—illegally. He kicks them out, but oddly finds himself drawn to one of them, who turns out to be Harry Bosch, the hero of the majority of Michael Connelly’s novels. This is an excellent strategy on the author’s part, and helped me settle into the story.

Harry asks questions—who had Jerry Vincent bribed? How was the FBI involved? Mickey doesn’t know the answers. Harry doesn’t believe him. But they will still be drawn together into the double mystery of Jerry’s murder and the Elliott trial, which turn out to be linked. And the killing isn’t over.

A good story by a master storyteller. Connelly did telegraph one surprise though, at least in my case. He generally keeps politics out of his books (for which I’m eternally grateful), but here he did mention one character’s conservative affiliations. I immediately thought, “I’ll bet this character turns out to be a villain.” And behold, it was so.

Maybe Connelly’s done the same thing with liberal characters in the past, but I never noticed it. (Then again, I probably wouldn’t.)

But storytellers, be warned—we know your poker tells.