Michael Connelly

New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly delivers his first legal thriller an incendiary tale about a cynical defense attorney whose one remaining spark of integrity may cost him his life.

Mickey Haller has spent all his professional life afraid that he wouldn't recognize innocence if it stood in front of him. Haller is a Lincoln Lawyer, a criminal defense pro who operates out of the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, to defend clients at the bottom of the legal food chain. It's no wonder that he is despised by cops, prosecutors, and even some of his own clients.

From bookies to con artists to drunk drivers and drug dealers, they're all on Mickey Haller's client list. But when a Beverly Hills rich boy is arrested for brutally beating a woman Haller has his first high paying client in years. It's a franchise case and he's sure it will be a slam dunk in the courtroom. For once, he may be defending a client who is actually innocent.

But an investigator is murdered for getting too close to the truth and Haller quickly discovers that his search for innocence has taken him face to face with a kind of evil as pure as a flame. To escape without being burned, Haller must use all of his skills to manipulate a system in which he no longer believes.

Featuring stories by: James Swain, S.J. Rozan, Wendy Hornsby, Michael Collins, T.P Keating, J. Madison Davis, Sue Pike, Joan Richter, Libby Hellmann, Tom Savage, Edward Wellen, K. J. A. Wishnia, Linda Kerslake, John Wessel, Lise McClendon, Ronnie Klaskin, Ruth Cavin, A.B. Robbins , Gay Toltl Kinman, Micki Marz, Rick Mofina, Jeremiah Healy

From #1 bestseller Michael Connelly's first career as a prizewinning crime reporter--the gripping, true stories that inspired and informed his novels. Before he became a novelist, Michael Connelly was a crime reporter, covering the detectives who worked the homicide beat in Florida and Los Angeles. In vivid, hard-hitting articles, Connelly leads the reader past the yellow police tape as he follows the investigators, the victims, their families and friends--and, of course, the killers--to tell the real stories of murder and its aftermath. Connelly's firsthand observations would lend inspiration to his novels, from The Black Echo, which was drawn from a real-life bank heist, to Trunk Music, based on an unsolved case of a man found in the trunk of his Rolls Royce. And the vital details of his best-known characters, both heroes and villains, would be drawn from the cops and killers he reported on: from loner detective Harry Bosch to the manipulative serial killer the Poet. Stranger than fiction and every bit as gripping, these pieces show once again that Michael Connelly is not only a master of his craft, but also one of the great American writers in any form.