Haller hires Bosch to help with case
Michael Connelly has written 31 books featuring now-former LA homicide detective Harry Bosch and/or his half-brother, defense attorney Mickey Haller, known as the “Lincoln lawyer” because his car is his office. Connelly’s latest, “Resurrection Walk,” easily ranks among his best.
Haller has started a mini-Innocence Project in his practice and has hired Bosch as a part-time investigator, to filter the dozens of requests for help he receives. Bosch’s job: vet the official documents.
He quickly finds irregularities surrounding the case of Lucinda Sanz, accused of killing her husband, a deputy sheriff. On the advice of a lessthan-stellar attorney, Sanz pleaded nolo contendere (accepting a conviction) to voluntary manslaughter, but insists she is innocent. Bosch spots enough inconsistencies in the paperwork to throw some of the evidence into question. Though he finds the idea of helping an accused cop killer anathema, he moves forward.
Of course, he’s right. Of course, Haller will get a reversal. Probably. But the fun is in the journey. Connelly’s skill as a writer draws you in and keeps you there.
It’s no secret that cops and prosecutors sometimes partner to keep an innocent person in jail rather than put a blotch on their records. But, just when you think Haller has presented evidence that exonerates Lucinda, the prosecuting attorney finds a way to keep it out of court.
Connelly’s expertise allows him to make it all convincing. The novelist’s command of facts and his logic propel the book forward. There’s never a this-doesn’t-make-sense moment.
Bosch and Haller are old-fashioned heroes, even when their livelihoods and personal safety are threatened. I like that. In “Resurrection Walk,” both have their homes broken into as warnings not to continue pursuing Lucinda’s case, but they do.
Yes, I know they’re just fictional characters, but we can always use another hero. — Curt Schleier, Minneapolis Star Tribune
The flood of pandemic literature shows
no sign of letting up. Now Sigrid Nunez, author of the National Book Awardwinning “The Friend,” has written a pandemic novel called “The Vulnerables.”
The title refers to the groups of people, including older adults, considered at high risk of getting severely ill at the start of the pandemic in spring 2020. The unnamed narrator, a stand-in for the 72-year-old author, is among them.
“The Vulnerables” is classified as a novel, but it more often reads like an elegant, funny essay about what it felt like to be stuck in New York City in the early days of the lockdown, when your wealthier friends fled to their country houses, leaving
you alone with a bad case of writer’s block.
The narrator broods about the writing life. “For the writer,” she muses, “obsessive rumination is a must.” About halfway through the book, Nunez stumbles on something like a plot: the narrator is asked to take care of a male parrot named Eureka for a couple stranded in California by the pandemic. The college student who had agreed to do it has fled the city, too. Then he returns, in part because he missed the bird. “We’re bros, he explained, to make me feel even more left out.”
Initially antagonistic, they slowly form a bond over edibles, vegan ice cream and microdoses of psilocybin. I wondered whether Nunez was heading into “Harold and Maude” territory, the 1971 movie about a troubled young man who falls in love with an older woman.
But Nunez knows that a conventional marriage plot is not an option in contemporary fiction. Plus, someone like her likely would have thought that he was not just too troubled but also too young. And so, their unlikely friendship becomes just one more oddball incident in this elegiac essay-novel.