Home » Authors » Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly is a Crime author, and he is best known for his Harry Bosch series and his Novel The Lincoln Lawyer that was later adapted into a film starring Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller.

About the author

Michael Connelly was born in Philadelphia, PA on July 21, 1956. He moved to Florida with his family when he was 12 years old. Michael 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. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.

Michael is the bestselling author of thirty-six novels and one work of non-fiction. With over eighty million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into forty foreign languages, he is one of the most successful writers working today. His very first novel, The Black Echo, won the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly’s 1998 novel, Blood Work. In March 2011, the movie adaptation of his #1 bestselling novel, The Lincoln Lawyer, hit theaters worldwide starring Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller. His most recent #1 New York Times bestsellers include Dark Sacred Night, Two Kinds Of Truth, The Late Show, The Wrong Side Of Goodbye, The Crossing, The Burning Room, The Gods of Guilt, and The Black Box. Michael’s crime fiction career was honored with the Diamond Dagger from the CWA in 2018.

Michael is the executive producer of Bosch, an Amazon Studios original drama series based on his bestselling character Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver. Bosch streams on Amazon Prime Video.

 

From Michael Connelly's Website https://www.michaelconnelly.com/about/

Editorial credit: Adriano Castelli / Shutterstock.com

 

By this Author

Harry Bosch Series

The Black Echo (1992)

For LAPD homicide cop Harry Bosch — hero, maverick, nighthawk — the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal.

The dead man, Billy Meadows, was a fellow Vietnam “tunnel rat” who fought side by side with him in a nightmare underground war that brought them to the depths of hell. Now, Bosch is about to relive the horrors of Nam. From a dangerous maze of blind alleys to a daring criminal heist beneath the city to the tortuous link that must be uncovered, his survival instincts will once again be tested to their limit.

Joining with an enigmatic female FBI agent, pitted against enemies within his own department, Bosch must make the agonizing choice between justice and vengeance, as he tracks down a killer whose true face will shock him.

The Black Echo won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel awarded by the Mystery Writers of America.

 

 

The Black Ice (1993)

The official report said suicide.  But in a city where murder is sport, Bosch isn’t ready to blame the victim. Narcotics officer Cal Moore’s orders were to look into the city’s latest drug killing.  Instead, he ends up in a motel room with his head in several pieces and a suicide note stuffed in his back pocket.

Years ago, Harry learned the first rule of the good cop: don’t look for the facts, but the glue that holds them together.  Now, Harry’s making some very dangerous connections, starting with one dead cop and leading to a bloody string of murders that wind from Hollywood Boulevard’s drug bazaar to the dusty back alleys south of the border and into the center of a complex and lethal game — one in which Harry is the next and likeliest victim.

After his richly acclaimed debut, Michael Connelly brings Bosch back in an achievement even more stunning and suspenseful than its predecessor — a  time-bomb of a novel supercharged with tension and non-stop action that doesn’t let up until the final, explosive ending.

Michael Connelly received the Maltese Falcon Award from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan for The Black Ice, which was judged the best private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year.

 

 

 

The Concrete Blonde (1994)

They called him the Dollmaker…

The serial killer stalked Los Angeles and left a grisly calling card on the faces of his female victims. With a single faultless shot, Detective Harry Bosch thought he had ended the city’s nightmare.

Now, the dead man’s widow is suing Harry and the LAPD for killing the wrong man — an accusation that rings terrifyingly true when a new victim is discovered with the Dollmaker’s macabre signature.

Now, for the second time, Harry must hunt down a death-dealer who is very much alive, before he strikes again. It’s a blood-tracked quest that will take Harry from the hard edges of the L.A. night to the last place he ever wanted to go — the darkness of his own heart.

With The Concrete Blonde, Edgar Award-winning author Michael Connelly has hit a whole new level in his career, creating a breathtaking thriller that thrusts you into a blistering courtroom battle — and a desperate search for a sadistic killer.

 

 

The Last Coyote (1995)

Harry’s life is a mess. His house has been condemned because of earthquake damage. His girlfriend has left him. He’s drinking too much. And he’s even had to turn in his badge: he attacked his commanding officer and is suspended indefinitely pending a psychiatric evaluation. At first Bosch, resists the LAPD shrink, but finally he recognizes that something is troubling him, a force that may have shaped his entire life. In 1961, when Harry was eleven, his mother was brutally murdered. No one was ever even accused of the crime.

Harry opens up the decades-old file on the case and is irresistibly drawn into a past he has always avoided. It’s clear that the case was fumbled. His mother was a prostitute, and even thirty years late the smell of a cover-up is unmistakable. Someone powerful was able to keep the investigating officers away from key suspects. Even as he confronts his own shame about his mother, Harry relentlessly follows up the old evidence, seeking justice or at least understanding. Out of the broken pieces of the case he discerns a trail that leads upward, toward prominent people who lead public lives high in the Hollywood hills. And as he nears his answer, Harry finds that ancient passions don’t die. They cause new murders even today.

 

 

Trunk Music (1997)

Back on the job after an involuntary leave of absence, LAPD homicide detective Harry Bosch lands his first case: a Hollywood producer found in the trunk of his Rolls-Royce shot twice in the head. It looks like “trunk music,” a Mafia hit.

The LAPD’s organized crime unit is oddly uninterested, but Harry thinks they’re wrong. He follows the money trail from the producer’s office to Las Vegas, where he quickly finds evidence of Mafia involvement. But something about the case doesn’t add up, and Harry follows a string of odd clues — glitter in the producer’s cuffs, an over-the-counter medication in the Rolls’ glove box — in a different direction entirely.

Just when Harry thinks he’s on firm ground, the bottom falls out. Blindsided again and again, at odds with his superiors, and overwhelmed by a romance that has cropped up in the middle of the case, Harry is as off-balance as he’s ever been. When the picture finally comes into focus, Harry discovers a scheme many magnitudes more deadly than he imagined—with himself now one of its targets. Running on instincts and nerves, with a short fuse and everything to lose, Harry must prove himself not just by breaking the case, but by surviving it.

Angels Flight (1999)

When the body of high profile black lawyer Howard Elias is found inside one of the cars on Angels Flight, a cable railway in downtown Los Angeles, there’s not a detective in the city who wants to touch the case. For Elias specialized in lawsuits alleging police brutality, racism, and corruption, and every LAPD cop is a possible suspect in his killing.

Detective Harry Bosch is put in charge. Elias’s murder occurred on the eve of a major trial: on behalf of a black client, Michael Harris, Elias was to bring a civil case against the LAPD for violent interrogation tactics that had caused his clients partial loss of his hearing. Harris had been acquitted of the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl, but many, including Bosch, believe him guilty. Elias had let it be known that the trial would serve a dual purpose — to target and bring down the guilty cops and to expose the real murderer of the little girl. Post Rodney King, the 1992 riots, and the trial of O.J. Simpson, the City of Angels is living on its nerves. To discover the truth Harry must dig deep in his own backyard — except that it’s a minefield of suspicion and hate that could detonate in his face.

And as if he didn’t have enough on his mind, his happiness with Eleanor Wish looks to be short-lived. Five cards on the felt are pulling her back to a place where Harry cannot follow, back to herself.

A Darkness More Than Night (2001)

Harry Bosch is up to his neck in a case that has transfixed all of celebrity-mad Los Angeles: a movie director is charged with murdering an actress during sex and then staging her death to make it look like a suicide. Bosch is both the arresting officer and the star witness in a trial that has brought the Hollywood media pack out in a full-throated frenzy.

Meanwhile, Terry McCaleb is enjoying an idyllic retirement on Catalina Island when a visit from an old colleague brings his former world rushing back. It’s a murder, the unreadable kind of murder he specialized in solving back in his FBI days. The investigation has stalled, and the sheriff’s office is asking McCaleb to take a quick look at the murder book to see if he turns up something they’ve missed.

McCaleb’s first reading of the crime scene leads him to look for a methodical killer with a taste for rituals and revenge. As his quick look accelerates into a full-sprint investigation, the two crimes — his murdered loner and Bosch’s movie director — begin to overlap strangely. With one unsettling revelation after another, they merge, becoming one impossible, terrifying case, involving almost inconceivable calculation. McCaleb believes he has unmasked the most frightening killer ever to cross his sights. But his investigation tangles with Bosch’s lines and the two men find themselves at odds in the most dangerous investigation of their lives.


City Of Bones (2002)

On New Year’s Day, Detective Harry Bosch fields a call that a dog has found a bone — a bone that the dog’s owner, a doctor, feels certain is a human bone.

Bosch investigates, and that chance discovery leads him to a shallow grave in the Hollywood hills, evidence of a murder committed more than twenty years earlier. It’s a cold case, but it stirs up Bosch’s memories of his own childhood as an orphan in the city. He can’t let it go. Digging through police reports and hospital records, tracking down street kids and runaways from the 1970s, Bosch finds a family ripped apart by an absence — and a trail, ever more tenuous, into a violent, terrifying world.

As the case takes Bosch deeper into the past, a rookie cop named Julia Brasher brings him alive in the present in a way no one has in years. Bosch has been warned about the trouble that comes with dating a rookie, but no warning could withstand the heat between them — or prepare Bosch for the explosions when the case takes a hard turn. A suspect bolts, a cop is shot, and suddenly Bosch’s cold case has all of L.A. in an uproar — and Bosch fighting to keep control in a lawless and brutal showdown.

The investigation races to a shocking conclusion and leaves Bosch on the brink of an unimaginable decision — one that will leave readers hungrily awaiting for the next Bosch novel.


Lost Light (2003)

Fed up with the hypocrisy of the LAPD, Harry Bosch has resigned and is forced to find a new way of life. But the life of a retiree doesn’t suit him. He has always devoted himself to justice, and he is still drawn toward protecting —or avenging — those whom the law has failed.

When he left the LAPD Bosch took a file with him— the case of a film production assistant murdered four years earlier during a $2 million robbery on a movie set. The LAPD — now operating under post 9/11 rules — think the stolen money was used to finance a terrorist training camp. Thoughts of the original murder victim are lost in the federal zeal, and when it seems the killer will be set free to aid the feds’ terrorist hunt, Bosch quickly finds himself in conflict with both his old colleagues and the FBI. He cannot rest until he finds the killer — with or without a badge.

Michael Connelly received the Maltese Falcon Award from the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan for Lost Light, which was judged the best private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year. This is Michael Connelly’s second Falcon Award, his first being for The Black Ice.


The Narrows (2004) (sequel to The Poet)

FBI agent Rachel Walling finally gets the call she’s dreaded for years: the one that tells her the Poet has returned. Years earlier she worked on the famous case tracking down the serial killer who wove lines of poetry into his hideous crimes. Rachel has never forgotten the killer who called himself the Poet — and apparently, he has not forgotten her.

Harry Bosch gets a call, too. The former LAPD detective hears from an old friend whose husband recently died. The death appeared natural, but this man’s ties to the hunt for the Poet make Harry dig deep — and lead him into a terrifying and unknown world.

The Narrows places Harry Bosch in league with Rachel Walling, at odds with the FBI, and squarely in the path of the most ruthless and ingenious murderer in Los Angeles’s history. What follows is a taut and tantalizing mystery that has Harry Bosch racing from the hostile vistas of the Nevada desert to the glittering Las Vegas Strip to the dark corners of Los Angeles. Through it all, Bosch works at his newfound life as a father to a young daughter, balancing the deepest love he has ever felt with his own sense of mission and his deep awareness of evil.

Here is what Michael Connelly said about The Narrows:
“This Harry Bosch novel is the sequel to The Poet — something for years I said I wasn’t interested in doing but could not avoid once the idea came to me. Harry investigates the death of a cop he once worked with and that leads him into the path of the Poet. Terry McCaleb and Rachel Walling make appearances in this book, and if you look hard enough you’ll even catch a glimpse of what Cassie Black (Void Moon) is up to.”


The Closers (2005)

After three years out of the LAPD, Harry Bosch returns, to find the department a different place from the one he left. A new Police Chief has been brought over from New York to give the place a thorough clean up from top to bottom. Working with his former partner, Kiz Rider, Harry is assigned to the department’s Open-Unsolved Unit, working on the thousands of cold cases that haunt the LAPD’s files. These detectives are the Closers — they put a shovel in the dirt and turn over the past. By applying new techniques to old evidence they aim to unearth some hidden killers and bring them to justice, for “a city that forgets its murder victims is a city lost.”

Harry and Kiz are given a politically sensitive case when a DNA match connects a white supremacist to the 1988 murder of Rebecca Verloren, a sixteen-year-old girl. Becky was of mixed race, and the case appears to have a racial angle. This was LA before the riots and Rodney King; the city was a powder keg waiting for a match. The detectives who worked the case all those years ago seem to have done a decent job, but something doesn’t fit.

Meanwhile, Harry’s nemesis, Deputy Chief Irving, is watching him. In the new “clean” LAPD Irving has been sidelined to a meaningless job. Compelled by vengeance, he hopes that Harry will make a slip.


Echo Park (2006)

In 1993, Marie Gesto disappeared after walking out of a supermarket in Hollywood. Fearing the worst, the case was elevated by LAPD commanders from the missing persons squad to the Homicide Division, where Harry Bosch was assigned the case. But the 22-year-old woman never turned up — dead or alive — and it was a case Bosch couldn’t crack.

Thirteen years later Bosch is in the Open-Unsolved Unit when he gets a call from the DA’s office. A man accused of two heinous killings is willing to come clean in regard to several other murders in a deal to avoid the death penalty. One of those murders, he says, is the killing of Marie Gesto. Bosch is now assigned to take Raynard Waits’ confession and to make sure the killer is not scamming authorities to avoid a date with death.

In confirming the confession Bosch must get close to the man he has sought for thirteen years. Bosch’s whole being as a cop begins to crack when he comes to realize that he and his partner missed a clue back in 1993 that could have led them to Waits and would have stopped the nine murders that followed the killing of Marie Gesto.


The Overlook (2007)

In his first case since he left the LAPD’s Open Unsolved Unit for the prestigious Homicide Special squad, Harry Bosch is called out to investigate a murder that may have chilling consequences for national security.

A doctor with access to a dangerous radioactive substance is found murdered on the overlook above the Mulholland Dam. Retracing his steps, Harry learns that a large quantity of radioactive caesium was stolen shortly before the doctor’s death. With the caesium in unknown hands, Harry fears the murder could be part of a terrorist plot to poison a major American city.

Soon, Bosch is in a race against time, not only against the culprits but also against the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI (in the form of Harry’s one-time lover Rachel Walling), who are convinced that this case is too important for the likes of the LAPD. It is Bosch’s job to prove them all wrong.

The Overlook was originally serialized in the New York Times Sunday Magazine. This novel includes material that was not published in the magazine, including new characters and more obstacles in Harry Bosch’s path.


Nine Dragons (2009) (also featuring Mickey Haller)

Harry Bosch is assigned a homicide call in South L.A. that takes him to Fortune Liquors, where the Chinese owner has been shot to death behind the counter in a robbery. Joined by members of the department’s Asian Crime Unit, Bosch relentlessly investigates the killing and soon identifies a suspect, a Los Angeles member of a Hong Kong triad.

But before Harry can close in, he gets the word that his young daughter Maddie, who lives in Hong Kong with her mother, is missing.

Bosch drops everything to journey across the Pacific to find his daughter. Could her disappearance and the case be connected? With the stakes of the investigation so high and so personal, Bosch is up against the clock in a new city, where nothing is at it seems.


The Drop (2011)

Harry Bosch has been given three years before he must retire from the LAPD, and he wants cases more fiercely than ever. In one morning, he gets two.

DNA from a 1989 rape and murder matches a 29-year-old convicted rapist. Was he an eight-year-old killer or has something gone terribly wrong in the new Regional Crime Lab? The latter possibility could compromise all of the lab’s DNA cases currently in court. Then Bosch and his partner are called to a death scene fraught with internal politics. Councilman Irvin Irving’s son jumped or was pushed from a window at the Chateau Marmont. Irving, Bosch’s longtime nemesis, has demanded that Harry handle the investigation. Relentlessly pursuing both cases, Bosch makes two chilling discoveries: a killer operating unknown in the city for as many as three decades, and a political conspiracy that goes back into the dark history of the police department.


The Black Box (2012)

In a case that spans 20 years, Harry Bosch links the bullet from a recent crime to a file from 1992, the killing of a young female photojournalist during the L.A. riots. Harry originally investigated the murder, but it was then handed off to the Riot Crimes Task Force and never solved. Now Bosch’s ballistics match indicates that her death was not random violence, but something more personal, and connected to a deeper intrigue.

Like an investigator combing through the wreckage after a plane crash, Bosch searches for the “black box,” the one piece of evidence that will pull the case together. Riveting and relentlessly paced, The Black Box leads Harry Bosch into one of his most fraught and perilous cases.

Named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2012,


The Burning Room (2014)

In the LAPD’s Open-Unsolved Unit, not many murder victims die a decade after the crime. So when a man succumbs to complications from being shot by a stray bullet ten years earlier, Bosch catches a case in which the body is still fresh, but any other clues are virtually nonexistent. Even a veteran cop would find this one tough going, but Bosch’s new partner, Detective Lucia Soto, has no homicide experience. A young star in the department, Soto has been assigned to Bosch so that he can pass on to her his hard-won expertise.

Now Bosch and Soto are tasked with solving a murder that turns out to be highly charged and politically sensitive. Beginning with the bullet that has been lodged for years in the victim’s spine, they must pull new leads from years-old evidence, and these soon reveal that the shooting was anything but random.

As their investigation picks up speed, it leads to another unsolved case with even greater stakes: the deaths of several children in a fire that occurred twenty years ago. But when their work starts to threaten careers and lives, Bosch and Soto must decide whether it is worth risking everything to find the truth, or if it’s safer to let some secrets stay buried.


The Crossing (2015) (also featuring Mickey Haller)

Harry Bosch teams up with Lincoln Lawyer Mickey Haller in the new thriller from #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly,

Detective Harry Bosch has retired from the LAPD, but his half-brother, defence attorney Mickey Haller, needs his help. The murder rap against his client seems ironclad, but Mickey is sure it’s a setup. Though it goes against all his instincts, Bosch takes the case. With the secret help of his former LAPD partner Lucia Soto, he turns the investigation inside the police department. But as Bosch gets closer to discovering the truth, he makes himself a target.


The Wrong Side Of Goodbye (2016) (also featuring Mickey Haller)

Only Harry Bosch can uncover LA’s darkest secrets in this new gripping thriller from global bestseller Michael Connelly.

Harry Bosch is California’s newest private investigator. He doesn’t advertise, he doesn’t have an office, and he’s picky about who he works for, but it doesn’t matter. His chops from thirty years with the LAPD speak for themselves.

Soon one of Southern California’s biggest moguls comes calling. The reclusive billionaire is nearing the end of his life and is haunted by one regret. When he was young, he had a relationship with a Mexican girl, his great love. But soon after becoming pregnant, she disappeared. Did she have the baby? And if so, what happened to it?

Desperate to know whether he has an heir, the dying magnate hires Bosch, the only person he can trust. With such a vast fortune at stake, Harry realizes that his mission could be risky not only for himself but for the one he’s seeking. But as he begins to uncover the haunting story–and finds uncanny links to his own past–he knows he cannot rest until he finds the truth.

At the same time, unable to leave cop work behind completely, he volunteers as an investigator for a tiny cash-strapped police department and finds himself tracking a serial rapist who is one of the most baffling and dangerous foes he has ever faced.


Two Kinds Of Truth (2017) (also featuring Mickey Haller)

Harry Bosch is back as a volunteer working cold cases for the San Fernando police and is called out to a local drug store where a young pharmacist has been murdered. Bosch and the town’s 3-person detective squad sift through the clues, which lead into the dangerous, big-business world of prescription drug abuse.

Meanwhile, an old case from Bosch’s LAPD days comes back to haunt him when a long-imprisoned killer claims Harry framed him and seems to have new evidence to prove it. Bosch left the LAPD on bad terms, so his former colleagues aren’t keen to protect his reputation. He must fend for himself in clearing his name and keeping a clever killer in prison.

The two unrelated cases wind around each other like strands of barbed wire. Along the way, Bosch discovers that there are two kinds of truth: the kind that sets you free and the kind that leaves you buried in darkness.


Dark Sacred Night (2018) (also featuring Renée Ballard)

Renée Ballard is working the night beat again, and returns to Hollywood Station in the early hours only to find a stranger rifling through old file cabinets. The intruder is retired detective Harry Bosch, working a cold case that has gotten under his skin. Ballard kicks him out, but then checks into the case herself and it brings a deep tug of empathy and anger. Bosch is investigating the death of fifteen-year-old Daisy Clayton, a runaway on the streets of Hollywood who was brutally murdered and her body left in a dumpster like so much trash. Now, Ballard joins forces with Bosch to find out what happened to Daisy and finally bring her killer to justice.


The Night Fire (2019) (also featuring Renée Ballard)

Back when Harry Bosch was just a rookie homicide detective, he had an inspiring mentor who taught him to take the work personally and light the fire of relentlessness for every case. Now that mentor, John Jack Thompson, is dead, but after his funeral his widow hands Bosch a murder book that Thompson took with him when he left the LAPD 20 years before — the unsolved killing of a troubled young man in an alley used for drug deals.

Bosch brings the murder book to Renée Ballard and asks her to help him find what about the case lit Thompson’s fire all those years ago. That will be their starting point.

The bond between Bosch and Ballard tightens as they become a formidable investigation team. And they soon arrive at a worrying question: Did Thompson steal the murder book to work the case in retirement, or to make sure it never got solved?


The Dark Hours (November 9, 2021) (also featuring Renée Ballard)

There’s chaos in Hollywood on New Year’s Eve. Working her graveyard shift, LAPD Detective Renée Ballard seeks shelter at the end of the countdown to wait out the traditional rain of lead as hundreds of revellers shoot their guns into the air. As reports start to roll in of shattered windshields and other damage, Ballard is called to a scene where a hardworking auto shop owner has been fatally hit by a bullet in the middle of a crowded street party.

It doesn’t take long for Ballard to determine that the deadly bullet could not have fallen from the sky. Ballard’s investigation leads her to look into another unsolved murder—a case at one time worked by Detective Harry Bosch.

Ballard and Bosch team up once again to find out where the old and new cases intersect. All the while they must look over their shoulders. The killer who has stayed undetected for so long knows they are coming after him.

 

 

 

Mickey Haller Series

 

The Lincoln Lawyer (2005)

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 defence attorney who operates out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, travelling 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 defence 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 Brass Verdict (2008) (also featuring Harry Bosch)

Things are finally looking up for defence attorney Mickey Haller. After two years of wrong turns, Haller is ready to go back to the courtroom. When Hollywood lawyer Jerry Vincent is murdered, Haller inherits his biggest case yet: the defense of Walter Elliott, a prominent studio executive accused of murdering his wife and her lover. But as Haller prepares for the case that could launch him into the big time, he learns that Vincent’s killer may be coming for him next.

Enter LAPD Detective Harry Bosch. Determined to find Vincent’s killer, he is not opposed to using Haller as bait. But as danger mounts and the stakes rise, these two loners realize their only choice is to work together.


The Reversal (2010) (also featuring Harry Bosch)

Longtime defence attorney Mickey Haller is recruited to change sides and prosecute the high-profile retrial of brutal child murder.

After 24 years in prison, convicted killer Jason Jessup has been exonerated by new DNA evidence. Haller is convinced Jessup is guilty, and he takes the case on the condition that he gets to choose his investigator, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch.

Together, Bosch and Haller set off on a case fraught with political and personal danger. Opposing them is Jessup, now out on bail, a defence attorney who excels at manipulating the media, and a runaway eyewitness reluctant to testify after so many years.

With the odds and the evidence against them, Bosch and Haller must nail a sadistic killer once and for all. If Bosch is sure of anything, it is that Jason Jessup plans to kill again.


The Fifth Witness (2011)

In tough times, crime is one of the few things that still pays, but if defence attorney Mickey Haller was expecting an uptick in business during the economic downturn, the reality is a different story. Even people needing legal representation to keep them out of jail are having to make cutbacks, it seems. In fact, the most significant part of Mickey’s business right now is not about keeping clients out of jail but about keeping a roof over their heads, as the foreclosure boom hits thousands of people who were granted unrealistic mortgages in the good times and now face being kicked to the curb in the bad times.

Lisa Trammel has been a client of Mickey’s for eight months — his very first foreclosure case, in fact — and although so far he’s managed to stop the bank from taking her house, the strain and sense of injustice have taken a toll. The bank recently got a restraining order to prevent her from protesting against their practices. Now, a high-level bank employee, Mitchell Bondurant, has been found dead in the bank’s parking lot and Lisa is about to be indicted for murder. For Mickey, it’s back to what he does best on the biggest stage of all, but if he thought defending Lisa Trammel was going to be a walk in the park, he’d be wrong. Not only is he about to learn some startling truths about his client, but also about himself, and by the time the verdict is in, Mickey’s whole world will have been turned upside down.


The Gods of Guilt (2013)

Mickey Haller gets the text, “Call me ASAP — 187,” and the California penal code for murder immediately gets his attention. Murder cases have the highest stakes and the biggest paydays, and they always mean Haller has to be at the top of his game.

When Mickey learns that the victim was his own former client, a prostitute he thought he had rescued and put on the straight and narrow path, he knows he is on the hook for this one. He soon finds out that she was back in LA and back in the life. Far from saving her, Mickey may have been the one who put her in danger.

Haunted by the ghosts of his past, Mickey must work tirelessly and bring all his skill to bear on a case that could mean his ultimate redemption or proof of his ultimate guilt.


The Law Of Innocence (2020) (also featuring Harry Bosch)

Defence attorney Mickey Haller is pulled over by police, who find the body of a client in the trunk of his Lincoln. Haller is charged with murder and can’t make the exorbitant $5 million bail slapped on him by a vindictive judge.

Mickey elects to defend himself and must strategize and build his defence from his jail cell in the Twin Towers Correctional Center in downtown Los Angeles, all the while looking over his shoulder–as an officer of the court, he is an instant target.

Mickey knows he’s been framed. Now, with the help of his trusted team, including Harry Bosch, he has to figure out who has plotted to destroy his life and why. Then he has to go before a judge and jury and prove his innocence.


Jack McEvoy Series

 

The Poet (1996)

Jack McEvoy specializes in death. As a crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, he has seen every kind of murder. But his professional bravado doesn’t lessen the brutal shock of learning that his only brother is dead, a suicide.

Jack’s brother was a homicide detective, and he had been depressed about a recent murder case, a hideously grisly one, that he’d been unable to solve.

McEvoy decides that the best way to exorcise his grief is by writing a feature on police suicides. But when he begins his research, he quickly arrives at a stunning revelation. Following his leads, protecting his sources, muscling his way inside a federal investigation, Jack grabs hold of what is clearly the story of a lifetime. He also knows that in taking on the story, he’s making himself the most visible target for a murderer who has eluded the greatest investigators alive.


The Scarecrow (2009)

Jack McEvoy is at the end of the line as a crime reporter. Forced to take a buy-out from the Los Angeles Times as the newspaper grapples with dwindling revenues, he’s got only a few days left on the job. His last assignment? Training his replacement, a low-cost reporter just out of journalism school. But Jack has other plans for his exit. He is going to go out with a bang — a final story that will win the newspaper journalism’s highest honour — a Pulitzer prize.

Jack focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer from the projects who has confessed to police that he brutally raped and strangled one of his crack clients. Jack convinces Alonzo’s mother to cooperate with his investigation into the possibility of her son’s innocence. But she has fallen for the oldest reporter’s trick in the book. Jack’s real intention is to use his access to report and write a story that explains how societal dysfunction and neglect created a 16-year-old killer.

But as Jack delves into the story he soon realizes that Alonzo’s so-called confession is bogus, and Jack is soon off and running on the biggest story he’s had since The Poet crossed his path years before. He reunites with FBI Agent Rachel Walling to go after a killer who has worked completely below police and FBI radar — and with perfect knowledge of any move against him. What Jack doesn’t know is that his investigation has inadvertently set off a digital tripwire. The killer knows Jack is coming — and he’s ready.


Fair Warning (2020)

Veteran reporter Jack McEvoy has taken down killers before, but when a woman he had a one-night stand with is murdered in a particularly brutal way, he realizes he might be facing a criminal mind unlike any he’s ever encountered.

Jack investigates – against the warnings of the police and his own editor – and makes a shocking discovery that connects the crime to other mysterious deaths across the country. Undetected by law enforcement, a vicious killer has been hunting women, using genetic data shared by the victims themselves to select and stalk his targets.

Uncovering the murkiest corners of the dark web, Jack races to find and protect the last source who can lead him to his quarry. But the killer has already chosen his next target, and he’s ready to strike.


Information on this page credited to https://www.michaelconnelly.com/series/

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Skip to toolbar