Category Archives: legal thriller

Review: DEFENDING JACOB by William Landay

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DEFENDING JACOB is narrated by Andy Barber, a 51 year old assistant District Attorney in Newton, Connecticut. When a teenage boy and classmate of Barber’s son Jacob is murdered on his way to school one morning Barber leaps into the investigation. After a slow start, largely due to a lack of cooperation from the high school students who were friends and classmates of the victim, seems to point in the direction of a local man who has been accused of indecent assault. But while Barber pursues that line of investigation other players in the Newton law enforcement community are chasing a different suspect: Barber’s own son. When they believe they have enough evidence they confront Barber and issue an arrest warrant for Jacob. What follows is an accounting of Jacob’s trial and the impact it and the surrounding media and social scrutiny all have on the Barber family.

From a storytelling point of view I found the book uneven. The title tells us that Jacob is going to need defending so I was waiting for that point from the very first sentence and it seemed to take a heck of a long time to get there. Once we got to what I thought of as the starting point the book did pick up pace and drew readers into the familiar but nevertheless compelling consideration of whether or not Jacob was innocent but would be locked up or was guilty but would be set free. The depiction of the teenage social scene was a particularly successful aspect of the book. However I could have done without the major plot line revolving around the notion of an inherited propensity towards violence. It is a theme that has been explored many times over and while that in itself is not a reason to avoid it forever more I didn’t think it added anything to this story which dealt with the issue in a fairly superficial and uninteresting way. It felt like it had been added for shock value as no one, least of all the characters who were meant to, seemed to have any real convictions about ‘the murder gene’ notion one way or the other.

As far as individual characters go the book is a miss for me. It’s not so much that none of the three family members is particularly likeable or sympathetic (though they’re not) but that I didn’t find them to be very strongly drawn on any scale which made them insipid. Worse though is that they did not seem very credible, especially the mother. Her husband describes Laurie as a warm, outgoing person with many friends and a strong connection to her community and her own family. Yet she totally withdraws from her parents immediately and every single one of her so-called friends abandons her (again with immediate effect). Even I, anti-social introvert that I am, could drum up one or two good friends who would stand by me in a crisis so I found it a stretch to swallow that she would not have had one person who stood by her in the horrific circumstances. Nor did I believe she would withdraw so immediately from her own family. The depiction of Andy’s development of highly disparaging views on the legal system he had worked his whole life in also failed my ‘ring of truth’ test. For me both of these things would have felt more realistic if they’d been depicted as happening more gradually than both parties having woken up the day after Jacob’s arrest with an entirely new set of beliefs and behaviours from what they’d had the day before. As a collective character though the Barber family and its implosion is the best aspect of the book for me.

I didn’t hate this book but nor did I love it and on balance there were more niggly bits than there ought to have been. Even the editing seemed to have missed some continuity issues such as the fact that Barber tells us the man who prosecuted Jacob’s case went into private practice following the trial yet he appears to be questioning Andy in a subsequent grand jury investigation (transcripts of which pepper the entire book). Personally I wouldn’t recommend this book but having looked around at reviews it’s clear I am in the minority so, as always, you should make up your own minds. If you are an audiobook devotee you could do far worse than listening to Eric Meyers narrate it as I thought he did an excellent job.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

DEFENDING JACOB has been reviewed (generally in far more positive terms than I have done) at Bookgeeks, I’m Booking It and Raging Bibliomania

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2.5/5
Narrator Eric Meyers
Publisher Whole Story Audiobooks [2012]
ASIN B007RYX9KU
Length 14 hours 44 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series standalone
Source I bought it
Creative Commons Licence
This work by http://reactionstoreading.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Review: The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly

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Mickey Haller is a Los Angeles-based lawyer who hasn’t been practicing for the past year or so. All that changes when an acquaintance of his is murdered and Mickey inherits all of Jerry Vincent’s cases. Among these is the ‘franchise case’ (a term I’ll leave it to Mickey to explain) of movie studio owner Walter Elliot who is accused of murdering his wife and her lover. Such a case will put money in Mickey’s bank account and, if he wins, get his career back on track. However, the detective investigating Vincent’s murder, one Harry Bosch, is convinced that Vincent’s murder is connected to one of his cases, which may mean that Mickey is now in danger.

I listened to this book’s predecessor a couple of years ago and while I thought it could have done with a good edit, overall I enjoyed it. Unfortunately about the best I can say of this one is that it passed the time in a marginally more entertaining way than listening to the conversations of my fellow commuters would have done. It felt like Connelly had deliberately failed to include all the things I liked about The Lincoln Lawyer (Haller’s complex character make-up, a range of cases being tackled and solidly entertaining court room scenes) and incorporated all the elements I didn’t like much the first time around.

Perhaps because of the personal traumas he has experienced since the events depicted in The Lincoln Lawyer Mickey’s character has changed somewhat here. If he were someone I knew in real life this would be good news as he is less uncompromising and not as self-absorbed but as a fictional character he’s become a bit of a bore. He is now another mutli-divorced, substance-addicted bloke trying to re-connect with his child. Yawn. He’s also developed a conscience which, again, is more desirable in one’s real life acquaintances than fictional ones, especially when it results in a thoroughly predictable and saccharine-soaked ending. This is really where the book lost points with me as it was a total copout on just about every level.

The rest of the book was simply flat. The big legal case which occupies most of the narrative was completely uninteresting due to its central character being as emotionally disconnected from events as he could be. With legal thrillers I don’t mind if the accused is guilty or innocent but I want to care about that one way or the other. I want to be rooting for the innocent man to be set free or the guilty one to get what’s coming and at least be disappointed (if not devastated) if the appropriate result is not forthcoming. In short I want to feel invested in the case, its participants and its outcome whereas here I felt bored. The victims of the murder were barely described at all, the suspect was a cold, uninteresting fish and even Haller didn’t have a whole lot riding on the outcome of the case in the end.

To be fair the court room scenes were very good and added real tension, but they didn’t start until the last third of the book and by then I’m afraid my attention had waned considerably. I did like the fact the book explored the notion of the so-called justice system being much more about pizzazz and the size of your bank account than about determining innocence or guilt but even this was done in a rather detached way and without any real depth. The incorporation of Connelly’s more well-known character, police detective Harry Bosch, didn’t seem to add much to the story to me but I’m not a reader of those books so perhaps I missed something there.

My enjoyment of this book was, unusually, even hampered by the audio book narrator whose voice I found lacking in nuance (virtually the entire tale was told in a mildly aggressive monotone). The pronunciation was a little off as well. For example Mickey’s often repeated surname is rhymed with dollar throughout the book; a fact which annoyed me so much I did some digging (well I asked the good folks of the 4MA reading group) after finishing and discovered it wasn’t just my Australian ears finding fault, his name should rhyme with caller.

As is usual I am out of step with just about everybody who has read this book which has won awards galore and received glowing reviews aplenty. Sometimes I can see what it is about a book that others might like and simply acknowledge a difference of taste but here I’ll admit to being genuinely astonished when reading other people’s descriptions of the very same book. I feel like I have read a completely different work of art that was, through my eyes, bland and totally predictable.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

As I mentioned almost everyone else disagrees with me so do check out some other reviews including those at Mysteries in Paradise, Petrona and Reviewing the Evidence.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
My rating 2.5/5
Author website http://www.michaelconnelly.com/index.html
Narrator Peter Giles
Publisher Orion Publishing [2008]
ISBN N/A (downloaded from audible.com)
Length 11 hours 27 minutes
Format audio (mp3)
Book Series #2 in the Mickey Haller series (with a special appearance by Harry Bosch)
Source I bought it

Review: April Fool by William Deverell

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I’m counting this as the last book on the North American leg of my Global Reading challenge as well as the first stop on my Canadian Book Challenge which measures progress in terms of mountain peaks climbed so I have reached Glen Valley in Prince Edward Island (142m high).

Having settled into country life and new marriage to his next door neighbour, Arthur Beauchamp is enjoying retirement from a long and distinguished career as a criminal lawyer and Queens Counsel. However a particular April Fool’s day is destined to shake up Arthur’s new life on Garibaldi Island in British Columbia. Firstly one of his former clients, jewel thief Nick Faloon, is accused of the rape and murder of a relationship counsellor. Arthur feels an obligation to become involved in his defense because he still feels guilty about unsuccessfully defending Faloon against charges for a crime he did not commit some years earlier. On the same day Arthur’s wife Margaret, a staunch activist in their rural community, takes up residence in a tree house which has been constructed in the canopy of the area’s old-growth forest which is under threat from developers. Arthur is pressured to become involved in the legal side of the protest too.

This book is brimming with a wry, observational humour about the collection of lovable and/or odd characters that seem to inhabit tight-knit communities everywhere. Arthur is an unusual character for crime fiction being 68 and suffering from an odd assortment of self-doubts despite his successful career and happy home life. I really enjoyed his willingness to do the right thing even when he’d rather not have done and the credible way he explored his doubts about his relationship with his wife. I did groan though at the stereotypical needing someone else (i.e. a woman) to do even the simplest of household chores like turning on a washing machine.

In the city Arthur is assisted in his defense of Faloon by a colleague from his former law firm whose marriage is falling apart and Lotis, a young woman activist and law student. Although neither of them is the most reliable of people between them they do come through when it matters and they provide a lot of laughs along the way. Back home there are a plethora of characters to enjoy including the smelly poet who first shares the tree house with Margaret and near-criminals Stoney and Dog who do everything from build swimming pools to running the community’s taxi service (often with vehicles they’ve ‘borrowed’ from those they’re driving around). Nick Faloon has a relatively minor role but he too offers humour and engenders a surprising feeling of warmth towards him given he is an admitted thief.

At first I thought the mysterious element of the book was going to take a back seat to the character studies and environmental message but while it was slow to get going for the last two-thirds of the book this element is solidly imaginative and the resolution is both surprising and credible. Legal procedurals are not my favourite kind of reading but I enjoyed the way this case unfolded in court with first one side then the other seeming to have the advantage as different pieces of evidence came to light. The addition of even more quirky characters, such as the ultra-nervous clerk and the judge who is a stickler for punctuality add to the readability.

April Fool certainly offers a sense of its remote, environmentally sensitive location. I’m less sure that there was anything particularly Canadian about the setting as I could imagine similar events taking place in parts of Tasmania or any of the world’s other environmentally endangered remote locations but there could well have been some local nuances that I was oblivious to. Regardless of this the author has done a great job of depicting the passion and ingenuity involved in low-budget activism.

The book could have done with a bit tighter editing, perhaps a few less characters and one fewer red-herring thread in the legal case, but overall it was an enjoyable and unpredictable read. Its humour, setting, characters and solid plot make it the sort of reading most crime fiction fans will enjoy, especially those looking for a book with minimal blood and gore.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My rating 3.5/5

Publisher McClelland and Stewart [2005]; ISBN 9780771027154; Length 436 pages

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

April Fool has been reviewed at Crime Watch

Crime Fiction Alphabet: U is for Undertow

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We’ve reached the awkward bits of the alphabet for the Crime Fiction Alphabet meme and I admit I’ve found it a little difficult to come up with titles for my final 6 contributions. The back-end of the alphabet is just not as well serviced as the rest. The letter U is apparently so awkward that both the meme host (Kerrie from Mysteries in Paradise) and I have chosen the same book. Kerrie has already posted her take on the book and I really should look for something else but I simply don’t have time this week so I’ll have to submit my post about the same book :(

The letter U takes me back to Undertow by Sydney Bauer which I read when it was released in 2006. It’s a legal thriller in which Boston lawyer David Cavanagh defends a woman, another lawyer, named Rayna Martin, charged with murder. Martin was supervising a sailing trip to celebrate her daughter’s 16th birthday. When the boat capsizes one of the children, the daughter of Federal Senator Rudolph Haynes, drowns while Martin is rescuing the other three. Accusations of racism are leveled at Martin because the girl who drowned was the only white person on the trip.

Sydney Bauer is an Australian author who sets her books in the US and seems to have grasped the intricacies of the US political and judicial systems well. Undertow really is an old-fashioned legal thriller, focusing on the ways in which events, and people, can be manipulated to appear differently depending on interpretation. It is perhaps more than a little sad that I found it so easy to believe in a character like Rudolph Haynes who freely abuses his power as a politician to achieve his nastily racist ideals and a little less easy to swallow the ‘good guy’ and very likable Cavanagh.

Undertow was Bauer’s first novel and is a solid debut, bearing good similarities to the early John Grisham novels which I enjoyed. It shows how a law suit can be put together in such a way that even when no one disagrees about the facts you can still tell wildly different stories.

On the issue of covers I am ever bemused. I presume the first two are supposed to both be Boston but they don’t even look like the same skyline to me. I’d have gone for the boat myself.

Crime Fiction Alphabet: E is for Entombed

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My post this week for the crime fiction alphabet meme continues my homage to Sue Grafton, the original purveyor of a single word crime fiction alphabet, with a look at Entombed by Linda Fairstein.

This is the 7th book in Fairstein’s series featuring New York District Attorney Alexandra (Alex) Cooper and the detectives who have become her friends over the series, Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace. The novel features two main cases with the first involving a skeleton which is discovered in the wall cavity of a building due to be demolished. Because Edgar Allan Poe once lived in the building the case generates more curiosity than concern initially but when it is revealed that the skeleton is a relatively recent one and that a rapist who previously terrorised the city but was never caught has struck again on a victim who used to work in the same building, the find takes on more sinister overtones.

I have read 10 of Fairstein’s 11 Alex Cooper books over the years and, unlike some of my other favourite authors from my early days of crime fiction reading, she has never truly disappointed me. Some of the things that I particularly enjoy about this series are present in abundance in Entombed including the focus on different aspects of American cultural history, a subject I am woefully ignorant about but enjoy reading about because I now have family living in the US and always feel like I should know more. In this book the focus is on Poe’s life and work and this element is woven well into the story via the introduction of a group of Poe enthusiasts called the Raven Society. Also, for fans of the series there is, as always, the friendly competition between the three main characters to answer (or is that ask?) each evening’s Final Jeopardy question which is another unique feature of this series that I’ve always gotten a kick out of.

Fairstein has held the same position as the fictional Cooper and so the legal and procedural details have always felt very genuine. With so much media comment about violence against women being depicted in crime fiction I’m particularly pleased to be talking about this series because I cannot recall a single time when any description of violence in these books felt gratuitous. Subjects such as the rape or torture of women are dealt with but generally from the point of view of the victim and how they cope and are treated by ‘the system’. Here the story focuses on the young Swedish exchange student who is raped and almost killed rather than on her rapist’s point of view. I also think the books do a good job of exploring the complex legal issues surrounding sex crimes and this one is no exception with Alex attempting to indite the rapist based on his DNA profile even though they don’t know the name of the individual.

Towards the end of this book there’s a major incident in the personal life of one of the three main characters and this highlights another strong aspect of this series which is the strong relationships that feature. Although Alex is not terribly lucky in love she does have terrific relationships with both Mike and Mercer and also has some strong female friendships that help her cope with the traumas she observes and is occasionally part of.

My only review of one of this series here at Reactions to Reading is Killer Heat which I read earlier this year. It’s probably my least favourite of the series but I still rated it a very respectable 3.5.

My previous crime fiction alphabet entries are

Review: Killer Heat by Linda Fairstein

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Title: Killer Heat (the 10th Alexandra Cooper novel)

Author: Linda Fairstein

Publisher: Little Brown [2008]

ISBN: 978-0-316-73172-0

Length: 401 pages

When the bound and tortured body of a young woman is discovered in an abandoned Manhattan ferry terminal District Attorney Alexandra Cooper and Detectives Mike Chapman and Mercer Wallace start hunting for her killer. At the same time Cooper is also prosecuting a man who raped a woman in the 1970′s but who can only now be brought to justice due to DNA evidence and she’s also made it on to a gangster’s hit list and undergoes some scary moments due to that.

I’ve read all of the previous novels featuring Alex, Mike and Mercer and I must say that meeting up with them again is a bit like catching up with old friends. The strongest element to this series has, for me, always been these three characters who are particularly believable in their respective roles. For 25 years (until 2002) Linda Fairstein was New York’s chief prosecutor of sex crimes cases and I think that first hand knowledge shows in the legal details and the depictions of the cases being carefully constructed which always seem very realistic to me. It also influences the empathy with which the books treat victims of brutal sex crimes. This book has an especially poignant sub plot about a woman who was raped in the 70′s and her rapist went free because she couldn’t prove she had fought him. It really made me think about how far we’ve come in a relatively short space of time.

The friendship between the three is also something I enjoy, primarily because there’s never been a hint of unresolved sexual tension between any of them. They’re just staunch friends of the kind that people in the real world often are and people in fictiondom seldom seem to be and it makes a nice change from alcoholic loners or characters looking longingly at each other but never doing anything about it.

The plot of Killer Heat is a little disjointed. The sub plot concerning Alex being targeted by the members of a gang whose leader she had recently successfully prosecuted seemed a bit ridiculous, especially as it wasn’t really resolved (it just sort of stopped somewhere before the end of the book). The main story about the hunt for the killer of several woman relied heavily on long descriptions of a series of locations as well as more knowledge of American history than I’m ever likely to have so I did have to re-read a few parts before they made sense. I even resorted to Wikipedia once or twice which made me ponder what on earth we did before the entire world’s trivia was available at the end of one’s fingertips in the middle of the night.

Overall though the plot was resolved very satisfactorily and I was glad I met up once again with these characters. Fairstein’s personal knoweldge of the world she writes about brings an air of authenticity to this story in which the victims of crime are just as important, if not more so, than the perpetrators and investigators. I often think that victims get ignored or are depicted as basic stereotypes and this book definitely doesn’t do either of those things.

My rating 3.5/5

Other stuff

I couldn’t find a lot of other reviews. This one at In the News UK seems to dislike the things I like most including the fact that Fairstein resists the temptation to go for the obvious plot devices.

The 11th book in this series, Lethal Legacy, came out earlier this year and the 12th is due in February 2010.

Review: The Front by Patricia Cornwell

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Title: The Front (the 2nd book in the Win Garano series)

Author: Patricia Cornwell

Publisher:Hachette Audio UK [2008]

ISBN: N/A (acquired via download fromiTunes)

Length: 4hrs 26mins (unabridged)

Narrator: Kate Reading

I used to be a huge fan of Cornwell’s Scarpettabooks but some years ago found they had become bogged down in unnecessary length and the plots were increasingly convoluted and ridiculous. I eventually gave up all together after Tracein 2004. Since then I have, very occasionally, wondered whether I am missing out on anything by forsaking all things Cornwell so when I noticed The Front, the second of a series featuring Massachusetts State Police investigator Win Garano, was short (under 5 hours or less than 200 pages in the print version) and on special at iTunes I took the opportunity to check it out.

Monique Lamont is a District Attorney with greater political ambitions and as part of her long term publicity strategy she orders Win Garano, a special investigator assigned to her office, to re-open a 40 year old case in which a young English woman living in Boston was murdered. Lamont seems to think they can tie the murder in to the infamous Boston Strangler case and Garano is both skeptical and reluctant to have anything to do with the investigation. He is supposed to be helped by a female cop nick-named Stump (which we discover has nothing to do with the fact she has a prosthetic leg) but she is occupied by other things including investigating a series of robberies.

The book is better than that last Scarpetta I read in that the story moves at a faster pace and is a more manageable length. But it reads more like the treatment for a new, not very good, TV series than a novel. There’s little depth to the characters and they all felt like stereotypes to me (the ice maiden female, her disgruntled, smarter underling, the feisty disabled woman, the hippy grandmother…).  There’s lots of dialogue but most of it is the kind of unrealistic psycho babble that no two humans would ever actually engage in.

The real downfall though is the plot. After meandering down some not terribly interesting alleys (maybe someone could make the theft of copper from building sites interesting but Cornwell couldn’t) the protagonist makes a huge leap of logic and the whole thing is wrapped up neatly. Except for the Scotland Yard connection: I still don’t know what that was about and I even re-played the last hour to make sure I hadn’t been daydreaming. Even though the book is short Cornwell manages to find room for a swag of irrelevant subjects including terrorism, the mafia, JFK’s Presidency and the aforementioned Scotland Yard.  I hope Apple paid her for the numerous mentions of their famous phone because the gratuitous product placement didn’t help the book in any way. No one I know mentions the brand of their phone every time they check the thing for messages.

I can’t say I was disappointed by the book because I didn’t set out with tremendously high expectations. Perhaps that’s an unfair way to head into a book but this is the woman who revived a favoured character from the dead in the silliest plot device I’ve ever had the misfortune to read. Given that I didn’t pay much for it and it didn’t occupy a lot of my time I guess I’m happy to know for sure that I’m missing nothing by reading other authors in preference to Cornwell.

Audibook specific comments: I thought the narrator did a good job given the book was so dialogue-heavy and there were a lot of characters but as an Aussie I didn’t notice what was, according to other reviewers, a less than stellar Boston accent.

My rating 2/5

Other stuff

None of my usual sources have reviewed thisbook. I’m sure if you Googlethe title you’ll find the a swag of professional reviews which sing the book’s praises but in an undoubtedly pointless stance against the tsunami that is brand-name publishing I’m not going to link to them here.

Review: The Coroner by M R Hall

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Title: The Coroner

Author: M R Hall

Publisher: Macmillan [2009]

ISBN: 978-0-230-71127-3

No. of pages: 422

Jenny Cooper is the newly appointed Coroner for the Severn Vale district of England. Her predecessor died suddenly after dealing with the deaths of two young teenagers who had both spent time in a local youth correctional facility. One, a young boy, was reported to have committed suicide while at the institution and a young girl died seemingly of a heroin overdose shortly after her own stint in the same place. Cooper, recently divorced and recovering from a breakdown and the onset of anxiety attacks, becomes convinced that something untoward led to the two cases being closed so quickly and decides to re-open the investigations.

The book doesn’t fit neatly into any of the established crime fiction sub genres as it tackles the solving of crime from the perspective of a Coroner which, in England, is still a purely legal position similar to a judge or magistrate (in the US the role has in many jurisdictions merged the legal aspects of the job with the medical examiner’s duties). The book does a great job of highlighting this rather unique role in modern justice where the only goal is to determine a person’s cause of death and any criminal charges that might arise from that finding are someone else’s responsibility. Hall does maintain a decent level of tension and interest in what could have become a dry subject bogged down in legal minutiae.

My problem with the plot didn’t lie in the legal details but rather in what felt to me like a bit of overly forced leading of readers down an emotional path. The victims are depicted in a fairly one-dimensional and stereotypical way. The only sense we’re given of them is that they were both troubled, the young boy who died while in custody particularly so, but there’s no real sense of them as individuals. Occasional passages showing the young boy’s mother to be less than perfect, although loving, seemed to have been inserted almost as a dare to readers, and indeed to Cooper herself, to be anything other than outraged at the treatment of the young people. However it always felt like Cooper’s primary goal was her own crusade to get her life back together and the book didn’t give me enough to develop anything more than a detached curiosity about the resolution of the investigations. It tried, I think, to build a real sense of the injustices that can occur within a poorly funded justice system where no one is overtly evil but everyone is too consumed with protecting their own interests than in finding out the truth but I never quite bought it.

The female characters in this book are well developed and depicted. Jenny Cooper’s struggle to function normally while dealing with her depression and anxiety is very credibly portrayed. At times in her professional work however she’s utterly naïve and as petulant as a 4-year old which I found pretty unrealistic for someone who is supposed to have been a family lawyer in the public system for 15 years. Having divorced her controlling husband and barely maintaining a relationship with her own teenage son she develops some new relationships with other women including Alison, her Court Officer who she treats quite shabbily to begin with, and a journalist whose been looking into one of the cases that Cooper decides to re-open. Her supposed love interest, Steve the ageing hippy, didn’t really ring true for me and in fact most of the men are either evil, incompetent or irrelevant which is interesting for a book written by a bloke (cannily using his initials to disguise that fact).

I first added this book to my ‘must read’ list after hearing it discussed with much praise on the BBC 5 Live Books Podcast back in January. This undoubtedly led to me having quite high expectations which is something I try to avoid because, as happened here, the book didn’t quite live up to them. It was by no means bad, and I’ll certainly look out for the next one in the series which is apparently due out in December, but I did feel that parts of the plot were designed too pointedly to elicit outrage without much genuine emotion on offer within the story itself. However the portrayal of a little-known arm of the judicial system was first rate and I think Hall has a real ability to create interesting characters, at least female ones.

My rating 3.5/5

Other Stuff

Reviewed at It’s A Crime! (Or a Mystery)

Reviewed by Maxine at Euro Crime

Reviewed by Sunnie at Aust Crime Fiction

For a different view of this fascinating role within our judicial systems you could try one of my favourite Aussie crime shows on TV. State Coroner ran for two seasons in the late 1990′s and took place in a fictional state Coroner’s Court. It has some fine Aussie Actors (Wendy Hughes in the title role) and the first season is available on DVD for those interested.

Review: The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly

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Title: The Lincoln Lawyerthe-lincoln-lawyer

Author: Michael Connelly

Publisher:BBC Audiobooks [2005]

ISBN: 978-1-4056-7300-6

Length:14hrs 9mins

Los Angeles defence lawyer Mickey Haller is hired to defend Louis Roulet, a playboy businessman who has been charged with assaulting a prostitute. Roulet vehemently claims his innocence and Haller is attracted to a case where, for once. his client will have no trouble paying his fees.

In the first part of the book as well as the main case we follow Mickey Haller through numerous lesser cases of prostitution, drug dealing and fraud and learn many tricks of the vaguely dodgy trade he carries out from the back of his Lincoln town car. Although this is undoubtedly a more realistic portrayal of life as a defence lawyer than a story with only one case would be, some of the side threads are less interesting than others and my mind wandered a few times. The second part of the book, where action moves to the court room proceedings of the Roulet case, provided a much tighter narrative.

There’s a lot of detail provided in this book and a good portion of it is unnecessary and made the story drag, particularly in the first part of the book where the narrative wasn’t as engaging to begin with. The whole story is narrated by Micky and while that offers a very readable intimacy there are times when every minuscule moment of a scene is included and buildings, meals and clothing are described in excruciating detail. Perhaps some readers enjoy that kind of thing but it didn’t add any value to my reading experience.

However, even when I was bored to tears with the minutiae, Micky Haller kept me reading. His dealing and manipulation of the people around him, including but not exclusively his clients, offered a fascinating perspective on the law. In much fiction the main characters are all or nothing, good or evil, but Mickey is a hundred different shades of grey. He’s not really likable but I developed a grudging respect for him by the end of the book and even if you hate him I doubt you’d forget him in a hurry. There are a bunch of other characters but they’re overshadowed by Haller to a large extent so provide more of a window-dressing role than anything really meaty.

It’s difficult for me to whole-heartedly recommend this book because the first part was such a slog to get through but I did enjoy meeting Micky Haller and pondering the idea that an innocent man is the most dangerous kind of client a lawyer could have. The book provides a unique insight on the law and justice which, at least here, are rarely the same thing and it does rate very highly on my thought-provoking scale.  And the ending’s nicely unpredictable and full of tension which almost makes up for the slow start.

My rating 3.5/5

Other Stuff

Crimeficreader discusses several of Connelly’s releases in an interesting 2005 blog post

You can read an excerpt of the book at Connelly’s website here or listen to a clip of it here(although that’s a different version of the audiobook than the one I read)