A Compelling Duo of Whodunits
This pair of mystery/thrillers by a true master of the genre, Michael Connelly, will keep you glued from beginning to end. He has a marvelous way of spinning a gripping tale with impressively precise details and excellent character development.
If you haven’t yet gone to one of the DNA websites to trace your ancestry, you’ll think twice about doing so after reading Fair Warning (Little, Brown & Co., $29). Despite promises of confidentiality, how truly secure is your information? Your chosen vendor may make extra bucks by selling your data to research labs or other parties. Safeguards are supposed to prevent those buyers from knowing who you are, but how good are those measures? And it may be that those buyers resell the data to others whose security is lax.
Our protagonist, Jack McEvoy, is a former investigative reporter and onetime novelist who now works for a site that focuses on consumer fraud.
One day two detectives from the L.A. Police Department pay McEvoy a visit. He’s a “person of interest” in the murder of a woman with whom he’d had a onenight stand after they met at a bar.
McEvoy’s DNA ultimately clears him, but his investigative instincts are irrepressibly aroused. Some ingenious sleuthing leads McEvoy to realize he’s looking for a serial killer who calls himself “the Shrike,” after a bird that kills its prey by breaking its neck.
Before this tale is over, McEvoy, the central character of two previous Connelly novels, reconnects with an old flame, ex-FBI agent Rachel Walling, who had been fired for leaking confidential information to him during a previous case and who now runs an agency that does background checks on potential hires for clients. Connelly fans will eagerly await future books involving this duo!
The Law of Innocence (Little, Brown & Co., $29) brings back a character Connelly hasn’t featured in years: aggressive, smart-alecky defense lawyer Mickey Haller, who was made famous in the 2011 movie The
Lincoln Lawyer, starring Matthew McConaughey. Haller does much of his work in the back seat of his Lincoln.
An establishment figure Haller is not. He runs ads for clients on benches. Until the California Bar stopped it, Haller’s slogan was “Reasonable doubt for a reasonable fee.” Nonetheless, Connelly makes Haller sympathetic.
On his way home from a party celebrating a big courtroom victory, Haller is stopped by a police officer. He soon finds himself under arrest for firstdegree murder: There’s a dead body in the trunk of his car, and forensics finds the man had been killed there. Worse, Haller knew the victim well—a scammer he represented several times before dropping him as a client. Alleged motive for murder: The guy owed Haller money.
Compounding things further, a vindictive judge sets bail at $5 million. Haller decides to defend himself, knowing well the truism that a person who does that has a fool for a client. But given the stakes—life in prison—he trusts no one else with the task. Haller also recognizes that a not-guilty verdict wouldn’t suffice to save his legal reputation. He must uncover who set him up and why. As he puts it, “To prove true innocence, the guilty man must be found and exposed to the world.”
More daunting, Haller has to direct things from the slammer, where prisoners might kill him. Given his reputation as a hard-driving defense lawyer, Haller knows the guards and the sheriff ’s office wouldn’t mind seeing him done in. His fears are well-placed; especially dangerous are the bus trips to the courthouse.
Haller, who needs all the help he can get, mobilizes characters familiar to fans of previous Lincoln novels, including his half-brother Harry Bosch, memorable star of Connelly’s first legendary series. (By the way, Harry Bosch is the subject of a riveting television series—called
Bosch, naturally—on Amazon Prime. Leave aside plenty of time, because once you tune in, you won’t want to stop viewing, episode after episode.)