INSPIRATION FOR THE ORIGINAL SERIES THE LINCOLN LAWYER – THE #1 TV SHOW ON NETFLIX
The bestselling legal thriller has charismatic defense attorney Mickey Haller taking on a slam-dunk court case involving a Beverly Hills playboy -- but as it spirals into a nightmare, he finds himself in a fight for his life. Mickey Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. Bikers, con artists, drunk drivers, drug dealers -- they're all on Mickey Haller's client list. For him, the law is rarely about guilt or innocence, it's about negotiation and manipulation. Sometimes it's even about justice. A Beverly Hills playboy arrested for attacking a woman he picked up in a bar chooses Haller to defend him, and Mickey has his first high-paying client in years. It is a defense attorney's dream, what they call a franchise case. And as the evidence stacks up, Haller comes to believe this may be the easiest case of his career. Then someone close to him is murdered and Haller discovers that his search for innocence has brought him face-to-face with evil as pure as a flame. To escape without being burned, he must deploy every tactic, feint, and instinct in his arsenal -- this time to save his own life.
Amazon.com Review
This #1 bestselling legal thriller from Michael Connelly is a stunning display of novelistic mastery - as human, as gripping, and as whiplash-surprising as any novel yet from the writer Publishers Weekly has called "today's Dostoevsky of crime literature."
Mickey Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. Bikers, con artists, drunk drivers, drug dealers - they're all on Mickey Haller's client list. For him, the law is rarely about guilt or innocence, it's about negotiation and manipulation. Sometimes it's even about justice.
A Beverly Hills playboy arrested for attacking a woman he picked up in a bar chooses Haller to defend him, and Mickey has his first high-paying client in years. It is a defense attorney's dream, what they call a franchise case. And as the evidence stacks up, Haller comes to believe this may be the easiest case of his career. Then someone close to him is murdered and Haller discovers that his search for innocence has brought him face-to-face with evil as pure as a flame. To escape without being burned, he must deploy every tactic, feint, and instinct in his arsenal - this time to save his own life.
Q &A with Michael Connelly
Q:The Lincoln Lawyer is your second book to be made into a movie. How does that feel?
A: I am very fortunate to have this experience even once. I wish every writer got a chance to see the written work translated to the visual. It is quite thrilling.
Q: You’ve said that Matthew McConaughey nails the character of Mickey Haller. In what ways?
A: I would say it is in many subtle ways that add up to a big performance. Mickey is a guy who is always looking for an angle. He is a bit cynical and cocky. At different times in the movie McConaughey seems to convey these character aspects without dialogue. Then when it comes to dialogue and action he delivers flawlessly. The story is about a cool, calm man being put into a desperate situation. McConaughey makes that leap convincingly.
Q: What was your involvement in the making of the movie?
A: Almost none. I looked at the first and last versions of the script, took a few phone calls from producers and location scouts, and that was about it. I think my biggest contribution outside of writing the book was giving my trust to Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucchesi, the producers. They promised me six years ago that they would keep the gritty realism of the story – the-law-in-the-trenches aspect of it. I trusted them to do that and with Brad Furman, the director, they came through.
Q: What were your immediate thoughts when you first read the script? When you heard about each cast member?
A: Depends on which script. It was a long-running work in progress. I went from not liking the first effort to being blown away by the last version. I am a huge believer in rewriting in my own work so I knew that the more time they spent with the script, the better it would become. As far as casting goes, I don't write with anybody in mind. But I saw Tropic Thunder with Matthew McConaughey in it and immediately thought he would be good at being Mickey Haller. A year later he was cast, so I was happy from the start. The rest of the cast is just fantastic. As each was announced, I became more and more excited. John Leguizamo was in Brad Furman's previous film and was just excellent. When I heard he was aboard, it was a great day. Same with all the rest. Bryan Cranston happens to be the star of my favorite show, Breaking Bad. So I couldn't be happier with him in the cast.
Q: What was your inspiration for The Lincoln Lawyer? Is Mickey Haller based on someone you know?
A: I met an attorney who worked out of his car, not because he was not doing well but because he believed it was the best way to do the job in L.A. That was the spark, and it went from there.
Q: Are there any scenes in the film that you wish were in the book?
A: There are definitely a few lines I wish were in the book. There is a scene where Mickey drops his sleeping daughter off at his ex-wife's home. It is a poignant scene that I really love and could have used in the book.
Q: Did you visit the set while they were filming the movie? What was that experience like?
A: I went four different times and scheduled the visits to coincide with the shooting of some significant scenes. I loved what I was seeing on both sides of the camera: a lot of dedication to the project. Everyone on the crew felt like they were making something good. It was great to witness.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
The morning air off the Mojave in late winter is as clean and crisp as you'll ever breathe in Los Angeles County. It carries the taste of promise on it. When it starts blowing in like that I like to keep a window open in my office. There are a few people who know this routine of mine, people like Fernando Valenzuela. The bondsman, not the baseball pitcher. He called me as I was coming into Lancaster for a nine o'clock calendar call. He must have heard the wind whistling in my cell phone.
"Mick," he said, "you up north this morning?"
"At the moment," I said as I put the window up to hear him better. "You got something?"
"Yeah, I got something. I think I got a franchise player here. But his first appearance is at eleven. Can you make it back down in time?"
Valenzuela has a storefront office on Van Nuys Boulevard a block from the civic center, which includes two courthouses and the Van Nuys jail. He calls his business Liberty Bail Bonds. His phone number, in red neon on the roof of his establishment, can be seen from the high-power wing on the third floor of the jail. His number is scratched into the paint on the wall next to every pay phone on every other ward in the jail.
You could say his name is also permanently scratched onto my Christmas list. At the end of the year I give a can of salted nuts to everybody on it. Planters holiday mix. Each can has a ribbon and bow on it. But no nuts inside. Just cash. I have a lot of bail bondsmen on my Christmas list. I eat holiday mix out of Tupperware well into spring. Since my last divorce, it is sometimes all I get for dinner.
Before answering Valenzuela's question I thought about the calendar call I was headed to. My client was named Harold Casey. If the docket was handled alphabetically I could make an eleven o'clock hearing down in Van Nuys, no problem. But Judge Orton Powell was in his last term on the bench. He was retiring. That meant he no longer faced reelection pressures, like those from the private bar. To demonstrate his freedom-and possibly as a form of payback to those he had been politically beholden to for twelve years-he liked to mix things up in his courtroom. Sometimes the calendar went alphabetical, sometimes reverse alphabetical, sometimes by filing date. You never knew how the call would go until you got there. Often lawyers cooled their heels for better than an hour in Powell's courtroom. The judge liked that.
"I think I can make eleven," I said, without knowing for sure. "What's the case?"
"Guy's gotta be big money. Beverly Hills address, family lawyer waltzing in here first thing. This is the real thing, Mick. They booked him on a half mil and his mother's lawyer came in here today ready to sign over property in Malibu to secure it. Didn't even ask about getting it lowered first. I guess they aren't too worried about him running."
"Booked for what?" I asked.
I kept my voice even. The scent of money in the water often leads to a feeding frenzy but I had taken care of Valenzuela on enough Christmases to know I had him on the hook exclusively. I could play it cool.
"The cops booked him for ag-assault, GBI and attempted rape for starters," the bondsman answered. "The DA hasn't filed yet as far as I know."
The police usually overbooked the charges. What mattered was what the prosecutors finally filed and took to court. I always say cases go in like a lion and come out like a lamb. A case going in as attempted rape and aggravated assault with great bodily injury could easily come out as simple battery. It wouldn't surprise me and it wouldn't make for much of a franchise case. Still, if I could get to the client and make a fee agreement based on the announced charges, I could look good when the DA later knocked them down.
"You got any of the details?" I asked.
"He was booked last night. It sounds like a bar pickup gone bad. The family lawyer said the woman's in it for the money. You know, the civil suit to follow the criminal case. But I'm not so sure. She got beat up pretty good from what I heard."
"What's the family lawyer's name?"
"Hold on a sec. I've got his card here somewhere."
I looked out the window while waiting for Valenzuela to find the business card. I was two minutes from the Lancaster courthouse and twelve minutes from calendar call. I needed at least three of those minutes in between to confer with my client and give him the bad news.
"Okay, here it is," Valenzuela said. "Guy's name is Cecil C. Dobbs, Esquire. Out of Century City. See, I told you. Money."
Valenzuela was right. But it wasn't the lawyer's Century City address that said money. It was the name. I knew of C. C. Dobbs by reputation and guessed that there wouldn't be more than one or two names on his entire client list that didn't have a Bel-Air or Holmby Hills address. His kind of client went home to the places where the stars seemed to reach down at night to touch the anointed.
"Give me the client's name," I said.
"That would be Louis Ross Roulet."
He spelled it and I wrote it down on a legal pad.
"Almost like the spinning wheel but you pronounce it Roo- lay ," he said. "You going to be here, Mick?"
Before responding I wrote the name C. C. Dobbs on the pad. I then answered Valenzuela with a question.
"Why me?" I asked. "Was I asked for? Or did you suggest me?"
I had to be careful with this. I had to assume Dobbs was the kind of lawyer who would go to the California bar in a heartbeat if he came across a criminal defense attorney paying off bondsmen for client referrals. In fact, I started wondering if the whole thing might be a bar sting operation that Valenzuela hadn't picked up on. I wasn't one of the bar's favorite sons. They had come at me before. More than once.
"I asked Roulet if he had a lawyer, you know? A criminal defense lawyer, and he said no. I told him about you. I didn't push it. I just said you were good. Soft sell, you know?"
"Was this before or after Dobbs came into it?"
"No, before. Roulet called me this morning from the jail. They got him up on high power and he saw the sign, I guess. Dobbs showed up after that. I told him you were in, gave him your pedigree, and he was cool with it. He'll be there at eleven. You'll see how he is."
I didn't speak for a long moment. I wondered how truthful Valenzuela was being with me. A guy like Dobbs would have had his own man. If it wasn't his own forte, then he'd have had a criminal specialist in the firm or, at least, on standby. But Valenzuela's story seemed to contradict this. Roulet came to him empty-handed. It told me that there was more to this case I didn't know than what I did.
"Hey, Mick, you there?" Valenzuela prompted.
I made a decision. It was a decision that would eventually lead me back to Jesus Menendez and that I would in many ways come to regret. But at the moment it was made, it was just another choice made of necessity and routine.
"I'll be there," I said into the phone. "I'll see you at eleven."
I was about to close the phone when I heard Valenzuela's voice come back at me.
"And you'll take care of me for this, right, Mick? I mean, you know, if this is the franchise."
It was the first time Valenzuela had ever sought assurance of a payback from me. It played further into my paranoia and I carefully constructed an answer that would satisfy him and the bar-if it was listening.
"Don't worry, Val. You're on my Christmas list."
I closed the phone before he could say anything else and told my driver to drop me off at the employee entrance to the courthouse. The line at the metal detector would be shorter and quicker there and the security men usually didn't mind the lawyers-the regulars-sneaking through so they could make court on time.
As I thought about Louis Ross Roulet and the case and the possible riches and dangers that waited for me, I put the window back down so I could enjoy the morning's last minute of clean, fresh air. It still carried the taste of promise.
The Lincoln Lawyer , a legal thriller, departs both in character and genre from Connelly’s crime-fiction series starring Harry Bosch. As it turns out, Bosch and Haller are half brothers—a convenient device to link the novel to Connelly’s popular series. Critics agree that his new character—a man who finds holes in the system to aid guilty clients and is forced to question his own moral code—is just as compelling as Bosch. In fact, notes The Oregonian , the novel "seduces us into rooting for a guy we detest." As usual, Connelly paints a convincingly shady world of flawed heroes, prostitutes, real estate agents, drug dealers, and cops, all the while delving into legal ethics, court procedures, and media issues. It’s a fast-paced, unpredictable ride.
[This] intricate, fast-moving tale barrels along...Beware picking up THE LINCOLN LAWYER. You won't want to put it down until you've navigated its rapids to the end.―Los Angeles Times
Connelly has stepped up to the plate in the overflowing ballpark of legal thrillers and blasted a grand slam his first time at bat.―Chicago Tribune
Hurtles into the realm of the legal thriller with excitingly renewed energy and a full bag of tricks. Entertaining as it is during the investigation phase, the book goes up a notch when the courtroom conniving takes over.― Janet Maslin , New York Times
One of the best novels Connelly has written, if not the best.―USA Today
All that Connelly readers have come to expect.―Denver Post --This text refers to the mass_market edition.
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.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Review
'It's the final Richard & Judy Book Club selection of the season ... With typical perspicacity, they've chosen The Lincoln Lawyer ... Quite right too.Connelly writes some of the most enjoyable crime fiction' -- David Sexton EVENING STANDARD --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
About the Author
Michael Connelly is the author of thirty-one previous novels, including #1 New York Times bestsellers Two Kinds of Truth, The Late Show, and The Wrong Side of Goodbye. His books, which include the Harry Bosch series and the Lincoln Lawyer series, have sold more than seventy-four million copies worldwide. Connelly is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels and is the executive producer of Bosch, starring Titus Welliver. He spends his time in California and Florida. --This text refers to the mass_market edition.
Description:
INSPIRATION FOR THE ORIGINAL SERIES THE LINCOLN LAWYER – THE #1 TV SHOW ON NETFLIX
The bestselling legal thriller has charismatic defense attorney Mickey Haller taking on a slam-dunk court case involving a Beverly Hills playboy -- but as it spirals into a nightmare, he finds himself in a fight for his life. Mickey Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. Bikers, con artists, drunk drivers, drug dealers -- they're all on Mickey Haller's client list. For him, the law is rarely about guilt or innocence, it's about negotiation and manipulation. Sometimes it's even about justice. A Beverly Hills playboy arrested for attacking a woman he picked up in a bar chooses Haller to defend him, and Mickey has his first high-paying client in years. It is a defense attorney's dream, what they call a franchise case. And as the evidence stacks up, Haller comes to believe this may be the easiest case of his career. Then someone close to him is murdered and Haller discovers that his search for innocence has brought him face-to-face with evil as pure as a flame. To escape without being burned, he must deploy every tactic, feint, and instinct in his arsenal -- this time to save his own life.
Amazon.com Review
This #1 bestselling legal thriller from Michael Connelly is a stunning display of novelistic mastery - as human, as gripping, and as whiplash-surprising as any novel yet from the writer Publishers Weekly has called "today's Dostoevsky of crime literature."
Mickey Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. Bikers, con artists, drunk drivers, drug dealers - they're all on Mickey Haller's client list. For him, the law is rarely about guilt or innocence, it's about negotiation and manipulation. Sometimes it's even about justice.
A Beverly Hills playboy arrested for attacking a woman he picked up in a bar chooses Haller to defend him, and Mickey has his first high-paying client in years. It is a defense attorney's dream, what they call a franchise case. And as the evidence stacks up, Haller comes to believe this may be the easiest case of his career. Then someone close to him is murdered and Haller discovers that his search for innocence has brought him face-to-face with evil as pure as a flame. To escape without being burned, he must deploy every tactic, feint, and instinct in his arsenal - this time to save his own life.
Q &A with Michael Connelly
Q: The Lincoln Lawyer is your second book to be made into a movie. How does that feel?
A: I am very fortunate to have this experience even once. I wish every writer got a chance to see the written work translated to the visual. It is quite thrilling.
Q: You’ve said that Matthew McConaughey nails the character of Mickey Haller. In what ways?
A: I would say it is in many subtle ways that add up to a big performance. Mickey is a guy who is always looking for an angle. He is a bit cynical and cocky. At different times in the movie McConaughey seems to convey these character aspects without dialogue. Then when it comes to dialogue and action he delivers flawlessly. The story is about a cool, calm man being put into a desperate situation. McConaughey makes that leap convincingly.
Q: What was your involvement in the making of the movie?
A: Almost none. I looked at the first and last versions of the script, took a few phone calls from producers and location scouts, and that was about it. I think my biggest contribution outside of writing the book was giving my trust to Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucchesi, the producers. They promised me six years ago that they would keep the gritty realism of the story – the-law-in-the-trenches aspect of it. I trusted them to do that and with Brad Furman, the director, they came through.
Q: What were your immediate thoughts when you first read the script? When you heard about each cast member?
A: Depends on which script. It was a long-running work in progress. I went from not liking the first effort to being blown away by the last version. I am a huge believer in rewriting in my own work so I knew that the more time they spent with the script, the better it would become. As far as casting goes, I don't write with anybody in mind. But I saw Tropic Thunder with Matthew McConaughey in it and immediately thought he would be good at being Mickey Haller. A year later he was cast, so I was happy from the start. The rest of the cast is just fantastic. As each was announced, I became more and more excited. John Leguizamo was in Brad Furman's previous film and was just excellent. When I heard he was aboard, it was a great day. Same with all the rest. Bryan Cranston happens to be the star of my favorite show, Breaking Bad. So I couldn't be happier with him in the cast.
Q: What was your inspiration for The Lincoln Lawyer? Is Mickey Haller based on someone you know?
A: I met an attorney who worked out of his car, not because he was not doing well but because he believed it was the best way to do the job in L.A. That was the spark, and it went from there.
Q: Are there any scenes in the film that you wish were in the book?
A: There are definitely a few lines I wish were in the book. There is a scene where Mickey drops his sleeping daughter off at his ex-wife's home. It is a poignant scene that I really love and could have used in the book.
Q: Did you visit the set while they were filming the movie? What was that experience like?
A: I went four different times and scheduled the visits to coincide with the shooting of some significant scenes. I loved what I was seeing on both sides of the camera: a lot of dedication to the project. Everyone on the crew felt like they were making something good. It was great to witness.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Lincoln Lawyer
By Michael Connelly
Time Warner AudioBooks
Copyright © 2005 Michael Connelly
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781594830877
Chapter One
Monday, March 7
The morning air off the Mojave in late winter is as clean and crisp as you'll ever breathe in Los Angeles County. It carries the taste of promise on it. When it starts blowing in like that I like to keep a window open in my office. There are a few people who know this routine of mine, people like Fernando Valenzuela. The bondsman, not the baseball pitcher. He called me as I was coming into Lancaster for a nine o'clock calendar call. He must have heard the wind whistling in my cell phone.
"Mick," he said, "you up north this morning?"
"At the moment," I said as I put the window up to hear him better. "You got something?"
"Yeah, I got something. I think I got a franchise player here. But his first appearance is at eleven. Can you make it back down in time?"
Valenzuela has a storefront office on Van Nuys Boulevard a block from the civic center, which includes two courthouses and the Van Nuys jail. He calls his business Liberty Bail Bonds. His phone number, in red neon on the roof of his establishment, can be seen from the high-power wing on the third floor of the jail. His number is scratched into the paint on the wall next to every pay phone on every other ward in the jail.
You could say his name is also permanently scratched onto my Christmas list. At the end of the year I give a can of salted nuts to everybody on it. Planters holiday mix. Each can has a ribbon and bow on it. But no nuts inside. Just cash. I have a lot of bail bondsmen on my Christmas list. I eat holiday mix out of Tupperware well into spring. Since my last divorce, it is sometimes all I get for dinner.
Before answering Valenzuela's question I thought about the calendar call I was headed to. My client was named Harold Casey. If the docket was handled alphabetically I could make an eleven o'clock hearing down in Van Nuys, no problem. But Judge Orton Powell was in his last term on the bench. He was retiring. That meant he no longer faced reelection pressures, like those from the private bar. To demonstrate his freedom-and possibly as a form of payback to those he had been politically beholden to for twelve years-he liked to mix things up in his courtroom. Sometimes the calendar went alphabetical, sometimes reverse alphabetical, sometimes by filing date. You never knew how the call would go until you got there. Often lawyers cooled their heels for better than an hour in Powell's courtroom. The judge liked that.
"I think I can make eleven," I said, without knowing for sure. "What's the case?"
"Guy's gotta be big money. Beverly Hills address, family lawyer waltzing in here first thing. This is the real thing, Mick. They booked him on a half mil and his mother's lawyer came in here today ready to sign over property in Malibu to secure it. Didn't even ask about getting it lowered first. I guess they aren't too worried about him running."
"Booked for what?" I asked.
I kept my voice even. The scent of money in the water often leads to a feeding frenzy but I had taken care of Valenzuela on enough Christmases to know I had him on the hook exclusively. I could play it cool.
"The cops booked him for ag-assault, GBI and attempted rape for starters," the bondsman answered. "The DA hasn't filed yet as far as I know."
The police usually overbooked the charges. What mattered was what the prosecutors finally filed and took to court. I always say cases go in like a lion and come out like a lamb. A case going in as attempted rape and aggravated assault with great bodily injury could easily come out as simple battery. It wouldn't surprise me and it wouldn't make for much of a franchise case. Still, if I could get to the client and make a fee agreement based on the announced charges, I could look good when the DA later knocked them down.
"You got any of the details?" I asked.
"He was booked last night. It sounds like a bar pickup gone bad. The family lawyer said the woman's in it for the money. You know, the civil suit to follow the criminal case. But I'm not so sure. She got beat up pretty good from what I heard."
"What's the family lawyer's name?"
"Hold on a sec. I've got his card here somewhere."
I looked out the window while waiting for Valenzuela to find the business card. I was two minutes from the Lancaster courthouse and twelve minutes from calendar call. I needed at least three of those minutes in between to confer with my client and give him the bad news.
"Okay, here it is," Valenzuela said. "Guy's name is Cecil C. Dobbs, Esquire. Out of Century City. See, I told you. Money."
Valenzuela was right. But it wasn't the lawyer's Century City address that said money. It was the name. I knew of C. C. Dobbs by reputation and guessed that there wouldn't be more than one or two names on his entire client list that didn't have a Bel-Air or Holmby Hills address. His kind of client went home to the places where the stars seemed to reach down at night to touch the anointed.
"Give me the client's name," I said.
"That would be Louis Ross Roulet."
He spelled it and I wrote it down on a legal pad.
"Almost like the spinning wheel but you pronounce it Roo- lay ," he said. "You going to be here, Mick?"
Before responding I wrote the name C. C. Dobbs on the pad. I then answered Valenzuela with a question.
"Why me?" I asked. "Was I asked for? Or did you suggest me?"
I had to be careful with this. I had to assume Dobbs was the kind of lawyer who would go to the California bar in a heartbeat if he came across a criminal defense attorney paying off bondsmen for client referrals. In fact, I started wondering if the whole thing might be a bar sting operation that Valenzuela hadn't picked up on. I wasn't one of the bar's favorite sons. They had come at me before. More than once.
"I asked Roulet if he had a lawyer, you know? A criminal defense lawyer, and he said no. I told him about you. I didn't push it. I just said you were good. Soft sell, you know?"
"Was this before or after Dobbs came into it?"
"No, before. Roulet called me this morning from the jail. They got him up on high power and he saw the sign, I guess. Dobbs showed up after that. I told him you were in, gave him your pedigree, and he was cool with it. He'll be there at eleven. You'll see how he is."
I didn't speak for a long moment. I wondered how truthful Valenzuela was being with me. A guy like Dobbs would have had his own man. If it wasn't his own forte, then he'd have had a criminal specialist in the firm or, at least, on standby. But Valenzuela's story seemed to contradict this. Roulet came to him empty-handed. It told me that there was more to this case I didn't know than what I did.
"Hey, Mick, you there?" Valenzuela prompted.
I made a decision. It was a decision that would eventually lead me back to Jesus Menendez and that I would in many ways come to regret. But at the moment it was made, it was just another choice made of necessity and routine.
"I'll be there," I said into the phone. "I'll see you at eleven."
I was about to close the phone when I heard Valenzuela's voice come back at me.
"And you'll take care of me for this, right, Mick? I mean, you know, if this is the franchise."
It was the first time Valenzuela had ever sought assurance of a payback from me. It played further into my paranoia and I carefully constructed an answer that would satisfy him and the bar-if it was listening.
"Don't worry, Val. You're on my Christmas list."
I closed the phone before he could say anything else and told my driver to drop me off at the employee entrance to the courthouse. The line at the metal detector would be shorter and quicker there and the security men usually didn't mind the lawyers-the regulars-sneaking through so they could make court on time.
As I thought about Louis Ross Roulet and the case and the possible riches and dangers that waited for me, I put the window back down so I could enjoy the morning's last minute of clean, fresh air. It still carried the taste of promise.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Lincoln Lawyerby Michael Connelly Copyright © 2005 by Michael Connelly. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From AudioFile
It's appropriate that this audio publisher chose a new voice for Connelly's latest character, criminal lawyer Mickey Haller. Adam Grupper turns in a supercharged performance as Haller, who conducts most of his business from the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car. He's called upon to defend a rich woman's playboy son, who is arrested for brutally beating a prostitute. Mickey Haller is no Harry Bosch, and he's not meant to be. His character is younger--as is the sound of Grupper's voice--and he's less discriminating about morality. Still, as portrayed by Grupper, you can't help liking him. He blends just the right amount of attitude, wit, and toughness to deliver a Cadillac performance. A.L.H. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From Bookmarks Magazine
The Lincoln Lawyer , a legal thriller, departs both in character and genre from Connelly’s crime-fiction series starring Harry Bosch. As it turns out, Bosch and Haller are half brothers—a convenient device to link the novel to Connelly’s popular series. Critics agree that his new character—a man who finds holes in the system to aid guilty clients and is forced to question his own moral code—is just as compelling as Bosch. In fact, notes The Oregonian , the novel "seduces us into rooting for a guy we detest." As usual, Connelly paints a convincingly shady world of flawed heroes, prostitutes, real estate agents, drug dealers, and cops, all the while delving into legal ethics, court procedures, and media issues. It’s a fast-paced, unpredictable ride.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Connelly's first legal thriller has gotten virtually universal raves for its courage, plotting and humor—and those qualities also make the audio version a triumph. Grupper vividly brings to life Connelly's large cast of characters: from the shrewd, hard-working criminal defense lawyer Mickey Haller—whose office is the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car and who spends his advertising budget in the Yellow Pages—to the sleazy collection of biker outlaws, con artists and prostitutes who make up most of his clients. Grupper is especially subtle as he reads the words of Louis Ross Roulet, a Beverly Hills real estate agent charged with attempted murder—a character whose guilt and motives darken at every appearance. Haller distrusts Roulet almost immediately, but he also sees the man's wealthy mother as the source of the long-running financial franchise every criminal lawyer longs for. Grupper's take on Connelly's scenes between Haller and Roulet is taut and fascinating: an audio tour-de-force of the highest order. Equally compelling are Haller's scenes with his two ex-wives; his friend and investigator; and a compelling client from the past who went to prison because Mickey couldn't believe he was innocent.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Review
Will fascinate...and dazzle.―People
[This] intricate, fast-moving tale barrels along...Beware picking up THE LINCOLN LAWYER. You won't want to put it down until you've navigated its rapids to the end.―Los Angeles Times
Connelly has stepped up to the plate in the overflowing ballpark of legal thrillers and blasted a grand slam his first time at bat.―Chicago Tribune
Hurtles into the realm of the legal thriller with excitingly renewed energy and a full bag of tricks. Entertaining as it is during the investigation phase, the book goes up a notch when the courtroom conniving takes over.― Janet Maslin , New York Times
One of the best novels Connelly has written, if not the best.―USA Today
All that Connelly readers have come to expect.―Denver Post --This text refers to the mass_market edition.
From Booklist
Starred Review Defending deadbeats is a way of life for Los Angeles attorney Michael "Mickey" Haller. Operating out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car (hence the moniker, "Lincoln Lawyer"), Haller takes on the case of Louis Ross Roulet, a rich, young Beverly Hills realtor accused of beating a prostitute. Roulet's guilt or innocence is of little concern to Haller, who sees him as nothing more than a "franchise," a client who can make him a lot of money over an extended period of time. But the deeper Haller digs, the more he suspects Roulet might have been framed. Links to a past case, which landed a client on Death Row, prompt the jaded lawyer to reassess his professional M.O. This is the first legal thriller for Connelly, author of the best-selling series featuring Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch and winner of every major prize in crime fiction. It has all the right stuff: a sinuous plot, crisp dialogue, and a roster of reprehensible characters (including a marijuana- and crystal meth-dealing biker and an internet con artist who steals credit card numbers through a tsunami relief fund). As the trial progresses, Mickey ponders the words of his late lawyer father, who knew the most frightening client of all was an innocent man. "If . . . he goes to prison, it'll scar you for life." Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
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.
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
Review
'It's the final Richard & Judy Book Club selection of the season ... With typical perspicacity, they've chosen The Lincoln Lawyer ... Quite right too.Connelly writes some of the most enjoyable crime fiction' -- David Sexton EVENING STANDARD --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
About the Author
Michael Connelly is the author of thirty-one previous novels, including #1 New York Times bestsellers Two Kinds of Truth, The Late Show, and The Wrong Side of Goodbye. His books, which include the Harry Bosch series and the Lincoln Lawyer series, have sold more than seventy-four million copies worldwide. Connelly is a former newspaper reporter who has won numerous awards for his journalism and his novels and is the executive producer of Bosch, starring Titus Welliver. He spends his time in California and Florida. --This text refers to the mass_market edition.