Another novel from Connelly, one of my favorite crime writers, who wrote a number of the Harry Bosch novels, but he has moved into the court room in the last few years, with Mickey Haller, an iconoclastic lawyer, divorced but still in love with his wife, of course. He takes the impossible cases, this time of a women whose house was foreclosed on, accused of killing her banker. The evidence appears tight as a corked bottle of wine, but Mickey knows how to play all the angles, some slightly legal and, of course, he gets her off in the end. The joy of this novel for me was the detail in which he shows how a lawyer prepares for a case, how he interacts with both the prosecutor and judge, the importance of knowing how far to go. The plot, the trial is often broken up by Mickey's rendezvous with his wife, also a prosecutor, his daughter with whom he has breakfast once a week, his two side kicks in the office, one his other ex wife and her husband, Cisco, the chief investigator ex gang member. And Bollocks, his new attorney, fresh minted and out of law school, naive and idealistic about the law. She soon learns the facts of life, as it were, to being a lawyer. It ain't so pretty, the good don't always win, the bad sometimes do, and anything is legit if it helps your client. The hardest idea she has to deal with is Mickey's refusal to consider whether his client is guilty or not...it does not matter, he does not even want to know. His job is to get her off...Bollocks finds this hard to live with. Why try to 'get off' someone who is guilty. This plays at the heart of the novel, of our system of law, I suppose and I sympathize with her.
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