Lincoln Lawyer Rolls into Theaters

Ten years ago, Michael Connelly sat beside an attorney at a baseball game who told him he operated out of his car—that with forty-plus courthouses in LA, mobility was more important than anything else.

That was all it took for Michael’s mind.

I used to think Michael Connelly had the mind of a reporter and the soul of a novelist, but the more I think about it, I’d say he has the mind and the carefully honed craft of a professional reporter and the soul of a lonely jazz sax player in a small out-of-the-way bar in the middle of the night. The former shows in his excellent plotting and satisfying stories, the latter, in flourishes—riffs if you will—scattered throughout his books, observations and insights about the city of angels and demons and the angles and demons who inhabit it. This is most true of his Harry Bosch series, but also shines through in his first Mickey Haller book, “The Lincoln Lawyer”—now a film starring Matthew McConaughey.

Mickey Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense attorney who operates out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, traveling between the far-flung courthouses of Los Angeles to defend clients of every kind. For him, the law is rarely about guilt or innocence — it's about negotiation and manipulation.

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 defense 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 movie is good—always entertaining, often engrossing—and I highly recommend it. It’s best where it’s most faithful to Connelly’s excellent novel, weakest where it strays—particularly in the ending, where a riveting climax in the book is inexplicably made more pedestrian in the movie. Still, all and all the movie is one of the best things at your local movie house at the moment, faithfully capturing the gritty city—the sprawling slum where pretty people do ugly things.

The film also provides McConaughey with his best role in a long time—to which he responds with his best performance since maybe he played another defense attorney in John Grisham’s “A Time to Kill.”

See the film, but more importantly, read the book it was based on—and for other entertaining legal thrillers with more twists and turns than Mulholland Drive, check out all of Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller books: “The Lincoln Lawyer,” “The Brass Verdict,” “The Reversal,” and “The Fifth Witness.”

Each of these, like every Michael Connelly book, is like a trip led by a brilliant, trusty old tour guide whose night job is jazz musician.