(Print: 10/14/2008; Little, Brown and Company; Large type / Large print edition; 656 pages.) Audio: 10/18/2008; 9781415960660; Books on Tape; duration 11:21:50 (Feature Film: No, but it may become a tv series produced by David Kelley).

SERIES:
Lincoln Lawyer/Mickey Haller 2

MAIN CHARACTERS:
Mickey Haller
Harry Bosch-LAPD detective
Jack McEvoy-LA Times Crime Beat Writer

SUMMARY/EVALUATION:
In the same way that we get to peer inside the police department with Harry Bosch, we get to peer inside the court and law office with Mickey Haller. There are some parallels between these characters and I enjoyed their meeting of the minds.
Speaking of which, I’d like to mention that they share an interest in Jazz, and Frank Morgan is referenced. I see too that the print edition is dedicated in Memory of Terry Hansen and Frank Morgan.
*Note: An interesting aside: I am currently listening to a 2017 book called Incendiary: The Psychiatrist the Mad Bomber and the Invention of Criminal Profiling which tells about a sailfish hanging on the wall at the New York Journal-American, William Randolph Hearst’s publication, with the caption “Keep Your Eyes Open and Your Mouth Shut. This Sailfish Did Neither.” I am wondering if this fact is some sort of journalist’s folklore and might be where the author got the idea for this similar wall art in Haller’s inherited law office.

AUTHOR:
Michael Connelly (7/21/56) began his education in building construction, but luckily for us, shifted to journalism and creative writing. His subsequent career took the same path, first a journalist for three different popular newspapers, then a full-time novelist.
This, Connelly’s 19th novel, is the 2nd Lincoln Lawyer and the first where Mickey Haller and Harry Bosch encounter each other. Things start getting complicated with this one—Goodreads calls this a number 14 of the Bosch series, and it would be if it gets credit for being part of that series. Wikipedia skips this one for being part of the Bosch series, but it’s not as though Wikipedia is the authority.

Speaking of Wikipedia, it informs me that, this “novel won the 2009 Anthony Award for "Best Novel". It was also nominated for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger in the same year at the Crime Thriller Awards.”

NARRATOR:
Peter Giles (2/15/1971). According to IMDb, Peter Giles was born “in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is known for his work on The Life & Times of Tim (2008), Into the Dark (2018) and Portlandia (2011).”
Other narrations are:
"The Scarecrow" (2009) Audio book
(2011) “The Fifth Witness" by Michael Connelly
(2010) "Witch and Wizard: The Gift" by James Patterson
(2010) "The Reversal" by Michael Connelly
He’s a bit whispery, but once I turn the volume up a little I enjoy Peter Giles narrations.

GENRE:
Mystery, Crime, Legal drama

LOCATIONS: Los Angeles, Malibu

SUBJECTS: Movie Producer, love triangle, murder, mob, affluency, Jazz/Frank Morgan

SAMPLE QUOTATION:
From Chapter 1:
"Everybody lies.
Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Witnesses lie. The victims lie.
A trial is a contest of lies. And everybody in the courtroom knows this. The judge knows this. Even the jury knows this. They come into the building knowing they will be lied to. They take their seats in the box and agree to be lied to.
The trick if you are sitting at the defense table is to be patient. To wait. Not for just any lie. But for the one you can grab on to and forge like hot iron into a sharpened blade. You then use that blade to rip the case open and spill its guts out on the floor.
That's my job. to forge the blade. To sharpen it. To use it without mercy or conscience. To be the truth in a place where everybody lies."

RATING: I gave this book 5 stars because it maintains Michael's standards of great plots and characters, and I enjoyed, even more than usual, the interweaving of characters in the Bosch universe in this one. ( )

Un libro che letteralmente si divora, diviso tra colpi di scena e il progredire di un processo, del quale Connelly ci illustra magistralmente tutte le fasi.
Quasi un piccolo trattato di procedura penale americana.
Confluiscono nella trama i personaggi di Mickey Haller, Harry Bosch e Jack McEvoy, già apparsi in precedenti altri romanzi.
Imperdibile per gli appassionati di "legal thriller"!

One of Connelly's best and a very fast read. The story emerged well and held together with LA being a steady stage for Haller and Bosch. Never over done. Even the court proceedings only dragged a little. The Germans and Kindler were rough patches. But I see and hear Garcia-Rulfo and Welliver when I am reading and they work great. The ending was a complete surprise. I hope they work together again. ( )

When lawyer Jerry Vincent is murdered, Mickey Haller inherits his caseload that includes defending the charge of murder against a powerful Hollywood executive. And while the plot is top notch, Connelly adds to the gripping story by making the courtroom scenes fascinating. Of the Connelly novels that I’ve read so far this is my favourite. I am looking forward to reading more in the series. ( )

(2008)2nd novel that concentrates on Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer. He inherits all of the clients of a murdered lawyer and is handed a huge case of celebrity murder. Turns out that the fix is in on the jury & he is teamed with Harry Bosch to try to sort it out. Story is OK but after reading Elizabeth George, this seems a big step down in quality of writing; an author compared to a writer.From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley Graham Greene liked to distinguish between his serious novels and those he called his "entertainments," though given the complexity of the man and his work it wasn't always easy for readers to draw the distinction. Probably Michael Connelly would be the last to compare himself with Greene, but he, too, writes at differing levels of seriousness. If at first encounter he seems primarily an exceptionally accomplished writer of crime novels, at closer examination he is also a mordant and knowing chronicler of the world in which crime takes place, i.e., our world. Three years ago, within the space of only a few months, Connelly published two novels notable for the serious business underlying the entertainment. The first, The Closers, published in May 2005, found his noted Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch trying to solve a "cold case" and thus trying to bring justice to victims on whom the law has turned its back. Then, in October of the same year, he published The Lincoln Lawyer, his first novel told from a lawyer's point of view, about an ambulance chaser named Mickey Haller, who, in the course of pursuing a lucrative case, finds himself seeking justice for a man he believes he failed to represent fairly when his case was being heard. Now, in The Brass Verdict, Connelly brings Bosch and Haller together for the first time. Though the novel has some serious things to say about the workings, and occasional failures, of the jury system, it is primarily an entertainment, and more than welcome purely as such. It's narrated by Mickey, a criminal-defense lawyer who is just coming off a year's self-imposed sabbatical -- he'd been shot in the gut and then had become addicted to painkillers in various forms -- and plans to ease slowly back into his practice. He's no K Street lawyer, as he tells a young man he takes on as his driver: "I haven't had an office since I left the Public Defenders Office twelve years ago. My car is my office. I've got two other Lincolns just like this one. I keep them in rotation. Each one's got a printer, a fax and I've got a wireless card in my computer. Anything I have to do in an office I can do back here while I'm on the road to the next place. There are more than forty courthouses spread across L.A. County. Being mobile is the best way to do business." Mickey's hopes of easing back in are quickly deep-sixed when a lawyer he's known slightly, Jerry Vincent, is found murdered in his car. He and Vincent had worked the occasional case together but hadn't been close. Still, Mickey is called into the office of the chief judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court and informed that Vincent "filed a motion with the court ten years ago that allowed for the transfer of his practice to you should he become incapacitated or deceased." Most of the 31 active cases in Vincent's file are minor stuff, but one is huge: "Walter Elliot . . . was the chairman/owner of Archway Pictures and a very powerful man in Hollywood. He had been charged with murdering his wife and her lover in a fit of rage after discovering them together in a Malibu beach house. The case had all sorts of connections to sex and celebrity and was drawing wide media attention. It had been a publicity machine for Vincent and now it would go up for grabs." Obviously, Mickey would love to have the case, but first he has to persuade Elliot -- who most emphatically is not a nice man -- to take him on. Once he does, Mickey is off and running. One of the people he runs into is Bosch, who is back on the active force and investigating Vincent's murder. Bosch wants access to Vincent's past and present case files because he believes the murderer was a client who'd crossed swords with him, but Mickey refuses on the grounds that to release the information would violate lawyer/client confidentiality. Bosch has 33 years on the force and is "a man on a mission" to seek justice wherever he can find it. He's a tough cop and an honest one, and there are angry sparks between him and Mickey from the moment they first meet. Mickey would just as soon have nothing to do with Harry -- Connelly's faithful readers don't have to be told that his real name is Hieronymus, "like the painter" -- but there's a problem: The deeper both men dig into Vincent's past, the more suspicions are raised. Vincent had received a lot of money, presumably from Elliot, and much of it -- $100,000, to be precise -- had disappeared. Mickey says Vincent claimed that "he needed the money to buy a boat and that if he made the deal in cash, he would get the best deal and save a lot of money," to which Harry replies: "There is no boat. The story was a lie." Vincent "bought something," Harry says, "and your client Walter Elliot probably knows what it was" -- something, for starters, like a potential juror. "You should take it as a warning, Counselor," Harry continues. When Mickey scoffs, he says, "His lawyer got killed, not him. Think about it. And remember, that little trickle on the back of your neck and running down your spine? That's the feeling you get when you know you have to look over your shoulder. When you know you're in danger." Mickey doesn't want to be scared, but as things unfold it appears he doesn't have much choice. One of those things is, how much -- if at all -- can he trust his client? Walter Elliot loudly and frequently proclaims his innocence and insists he wants a speedy trial to clear his name as rapidly as possibly, but though Mickey wants to believe him, experience teaches him to be cautious: "Over the years I had represented and been in the company of a couple dozen killers. The one rule is that there are no rules. They come in all sizes and shapes, rich and poor, humble and arrogant, regretful and cold to the bone. The percentages told me that it was most likely Elliot was a killer. That he had calmly dispatched his wife and her lover and arrogantly thought he could and would get away with it. But there was nothing about him on first meeting that told me one way or the other for sure. And that's the way it always was." If you're beginning to get a whiff of the O.J. Simpson case, well, that's pretty obviously how Connelly planned it. Not merely is the accused murderer a Los Angeles celebrity and the victims his wife and her lover, but Connelly drops in the occasional teasing reference as well. When Elliot blusters in court that "the sooner Mr. Haller gets to prove my innocence to the world, the better," Mickey dismisses it as "O.J. 101," and when another lawyer offers to pitch in and help, Mickey tells him: "He wants only one lawyer at the table. . . . He said no dream team." But all of that is just a little juice on the side; the main story is strictly Connelly's. The essence of it is this, as Mickey puts it: "I was defending a man I believed was innocent of the murders he was charged with but complicit in the reason they had occurred. I had a sleeper on the jury whose placement was directly related to the murder of my predecessor. And I had a detective watching over me whom I was holding back on and couldn't be sure was considering my safety ahead of his own desire to break open the case." Yet how does Mickey feel? "I felt like a guy flipping a three-hundred-pound sled in midair. It might not be a sport but it was dangerous as hell and it did what I hadn't been able to do in more than a year's time. It shook off the rust and put the charge back in my blood." Mickey is pumped, and, take my word for it, you will be too. Even though the way it ends is just a wee bit contrived, it's still a terrific ride.