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Mickey Haller has spent all his professional
life afraid that he wouldn’t recognize innocence if
it stood right in front of him. But what he should have been
on the watch for was evil.
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.
The Lincoln Lawyer 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
Dostoyevsky of crime literature.”
MICHAEL CONNELLY decided to become
a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while
attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this
direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative
writing—a curriculum in which one of his teachers was
novelist Harry Crews. After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked
at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida,
primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale
he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder
and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the
so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters
spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline
crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors
which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature
writing. You can read this story at the Sun-Sentinel web site.
The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper echelons
of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the
Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country,
and landing him in the city about which Chandler, his literary
hero, had written.
After three years on the crime beat, Connelly
began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus
Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on
a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles, was published
in 1992, and later won the Edgar Award for best first novel
by the Mystery Writers of America. Connelly followed up with
three more Bosch books, The Black Ice, The Concrete Blonde,
and The Last Coyote, before publishing The Poet,
a thriller with a newspaper reporter as a protagonist, in
1996. In 1997, he went back to Bosch with Trunk Music,
and in 1998 another non-series thriller, Blood Work,
was published. Blood Work was inspired in part by
a friend’s receiving of a heart transplant and the attendant
“survivor’s guilt” the friend experienced,
knowing that someone died in order that he have the chance
to live. Connelly has been interested and fascinated by those
same feelings as expressed by the survivors of the plane crash
he wrote about years before. Blood Work was released
as a major motion picture in early fall 2002 starring Clint
Eastwood, Anjelica Houston, and Jeff Daniels. Angels Flight
was released in 1999 and was another entry in the Harry Bosch
series. Void Moon, was released in 2000, and introduced
a new character, Cassie Black, a high-stakes Las Vegas thief.
His 2001 release, A Darkness More Than Night, united
Harry Bosch with Terry McCaleb from Blood Work, and
was named one of the Best Books Of 2001 by the Los Angeles
Times.
Michael Connelly was also one of the creators,
writers, and consulting producers of Level 9, a TV show about
a task force fighting cyber crime that ran on UPN in the fall
of 2000.
Connelly’s books have won the Edgar,
Anthony, Macavity, Nero, Maltese Falcon (Japan), .38 Caliber
(France), and Grand Prix (France) awards. He lives with his
wife and daughter.
- Bio courtesy of www.michaelconnelly.com
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