MICHAEL CONNELLY'S LAW OF INNOCENCE

An overlooked strong point of Michael Connelly’s crime writing, even when one of his major recurring characters is the lawyer Mickey Haller, The Lincoln Lawyer, has been his skillful adaptation of the courtroom thriller. This was most evident in Two Kinds Of Truth, where Haller’s half-brother Harry Bosch is being framed for planting evidence, even as he goes undercover to solve a double-murder at a pharmacy and break up a massive opiod scam business. The way the two stories are weaved together leads to a courtroom denouement in which Haller works his magic with the material Bosch and his own investigator Cisco have uncovered.

It’s told in the third person, but from Bosch’s point of view, so the reader is seeing the courtroom tactics with Bosch’s explanation, as if he were a commentator for the reader to the event. As an aside, in the television series Bosch, the same scene, with some crucial modifications (not least that because of film rights to The Lincoln Lawyer character, Haller does not appear) is handled in a similar way.

In The Law Of Innocence, it’s Haller who’s being framed. The body of a former client, a career con-man whose bills of course went unpaid, is found in the trunk of Haller’s Lincoln after a seemingly routine traffic stop, and the forensic evidence indicates he was killed in Haller’s garage. Haller decides to defend himself, because the only way to prove his innocence is to prove someone else guilty, and he’s the lawyer best-qualified to do that. The problem is, he’s in jail, and he’s got to get himself out and free to pursue his own investigation and courtroom manoeuvring.

What makes it work, of course, is the way Connelly builds the story piece by piece, as he would with any case. Haller, Cisco and Harry Bosch all follow leads, some of which lead in dead-end directions, but all orchestrated by Haller as he tries to build the foundation of his defense.

But what is really fascinating is the way the story is told, in Haller’s first-person narration. It’s one thing to see from Harry Bosch’s perspective Haller’s abilities to bend and twist the truth, to sometimes run roughshod over ethical bounds, as you did in Two Kinds Of Truth. It’s completely different when you are inhabiting Haller’s own point of view, and the way Connelly writes it, it’s as if you are inside his brain as it is spinning, making decisions on the fly. And this is not just in terms of the legal case; Bosch plays only a small part in the story, but you get a different perspective on how Haller views his less ethically flexible sibling. More important, when the story starts, Haller’s girlfriend has gone off seeking her own space; she returns in his time of need. And so too does his ex-wife, and mother of his daughter, district attorney Maggie “McFierce”. Haller’s own emotional boil is something Connelly writes with great precision, letting the reader see exactly how Haller is focused.

The case itself is not what he appears to be, which you would expect, but it is this low-key but bravura writing which makes it work. There are a couple of items left unresolved; I was irritated by a red-herring of lost papers that never actually reappears, but the others, the nature of the traffic stop itself and the machinations behind the frame-up, would seem to leave the door open for Mickey Haller to seek further justice for himself, and Harry Bosch would be just the person to be at the center of that.

The Law Of Innocence by Michael Connelly Orion Books, £20.00, ISBN 9781409186106

 

MICHAEL CONNELLY'S TWO KINDS OF TRUTH

Harry Bosch is still working cold cells, his office a converted cell at the San Fernando PD. But when the small town is hit by a double murder at a pharmacy, Harry's experience means he becomes the primary on the case, which he quickly realises is not just a brutal killing attached to a random robbery.

But just before the murders were called in, Bosch had been visited by an old LAPD partner Lucia Soto, accompanied by a DA and an investigator from the departments new Conviction Integrity Unit. Preston Borders, a sex killer Bosch had put away thirty years ago has petitioned for a new trial, based on the confession of another criminal to his lawyer. As the other man is now dead, the lawyer came forward, and a recheck of the evidence discovered new DNA evidence which backs up the confession. And if someone else killed Danielle Skyler, Bosch must have framed Borders with the evidence that did convict him.

Two Kinds Of Truth is Michael Connelly's second novel released this year, following The Late Show, which marked the debut of a new cop character, Renee Ballard. In my review of that book, to which you can link here, I wrote that Connelly's books are character-driven, though never shrinking as police procedurals, and often in the Bosch series resembling hard-boiled detective stories as well. I also noticed, in the previous Bosch novel, The Wrong Side Of Goodbye (link to that review here) the way Connelly's weaving together of two complex stories became driven by plot—which I thought might reflect the different approach to writing the Bosch TV series.

This novel's two stories aren't as complex, nor as deeply-layered as The Wrong Side Of Goodbye's were, but they are also, in a sense plot-driven. The pharmacy killings lead to a more serious drugs case, and Harry winds up going undercover to get to the bottom of the prescription opioid racket. Meanwhile, Harry hires his half-brother Mickey Haller to defend him in the re-opened murder case, which turns into a courtroom drama, and most interestingly, one based on what is, in effect, a locked-room mystery.

The first story is a thriller, and it really stretches the image of Harry as an action hero. Its pacing is quicker than the other story, in which the investigation has to proceed layer by layer, and much of it done by Haller and his investigator, and reported back to Harry. It also has to resolve itself like clockwork: legal clockwork, and legal is the meaning of the two truths in the novel's title. The mesh of the stories isn't as seamless as you'd hope: but both wind up being page-turners, reading to get to the solutions. It's the way in which thrillers and puzzles get to a similar place by different means; the dark interiors of hard-boiled Harry are what gets passed by to an extent. The great thing is, it doesn't matter. Undercover thriller, courtroom drama, locked room mystery. The menace of drug rings and the menace of venal DAs and Rat Squad cops. And Harry Bosch, whose character remains as deeply compelling as ever. Michael Connelly remains the best in the business.

Two Kinds Of Truth by Michael Connelly

Orion, £19.99, ISBN 9781409145554

published 31 October

note: this review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)

MICHAEL CONNELLY'S GODS OF GUILT

The Gods of Guilt, Mickey Haller's mentor 'Legal' Siegel reminds him, was Haller's father's term for the jurors in a trial, but, as he says 'there are plenty of people out there judging us every day of our lives for every move we make. The gods of guilt are many. You don't need to add to them.'

Mickey has just won a mistrial by using in court a manoeuvre that has nothing to do with justice and very little to do with law, one that he learned from Legal. He's just smuggled a french dip sandwich into Siegel's room at the old folks home, bending or ignoring the rules just as surely as they would have done in the courtroom. But Haller is about to have his own guilty gods visit him, when he gets called on to defend an accused murderer, an internet pimp named Andre LaCosse. LaCosse has been referred to him by the victim, whom Haller knew and defended under a different name, but who always called him her 'Mickey Mantle', the New York Yankee baseball star. Haller thought he'd saved Gloria Dayton, as he knew her, and helped her start a new life in Hawaii. Now she's lying dead in an LA apartment, and Haller can't escape feeling the obligation guilt invokes.

Even worse, he realises quickly that LaCosse is innocent, and as we know well Haller's worst nightmare is an innocent client. There is a great comparison to be drawn here with his half-brother Harry Bosch: Bosch is driven by his sense of justice, while Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, is driven by a chaffeur in his town car. Harry is concerned with the result, Haller with the process. It's like the TV series Law & Order, which got it backward: the cops aren't the 'law' part, that's the lawyers. It's the cops who seek to establish order, and the lawyers who manipulate the law, sometimes in the name of justice, but more often simply to win their battle.

Mickey has another god of guilt driving him; his relations with his daughter are at an all-time low after the events of The Fifth Witness, and he needs for her to see him doing the right thing. Which means that Haller needs to prove his client's innocence, and that means he must become a detective himself. Which becomes both difficult and dangerous, as he discovers Gloria's death may be tied into her testimony against another of his clients, and may drag cops and federal agents into the mix.

It's a story that weaves deeper and deeper, with Haller and his team functioning like a 21^st century version of Perry Mason and Paul Drake, in a far more dangerous world. The pace is frantic, and sometimes chaotic, just as you'd expect from the Lincoln Lawyer, but it works primarily because of the motivation: the plot is driven by Haller's own drives, and it is from his perspective that we see it. Connelly's greatest talent may be his ability to convey his stories through his characters, and to remain honest with their point of view, and he does that superbly here.

In my interview with Michael (see the previous post), he made one interesting comment. The producers of The Lincoln Lawyer movie remain interested in doing a sequel, but none of his follow-up books have seemed right to them, because they didn't have Haller himself feeling a sense of a mission, feeling that elusive need for justice which I mentioned at the start. This book does that, which is why Haller seems to move a bit into Harry Bosch territory. People have noticed that Connelly writes courtroom thrillers to match the best of them, but this isn't as much a courtroom novel as a real detective novel, with Mickey Haller needing to prove himself a detective. The pieces do fall together in the end, without gimmick, but it's the getting there that marks Michael Connelly's real talent as a writer.

The Gods Of Guilt by Michael Connelly

Orion £18.99 ISBN 9781409134343

note: This review will also appear at Crime Time (www.crimetime.co.uk)