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. As this book stresses, the privacy regulations in this burgeoning business are in their infancy.
Our protagonist, Jack McEvoy, is a former investigative reporter and onetime novelist who now works for a site that focuses on consumer fraud and sometimes provides juicy stories for such major news organizations as the Los Angeles Times. But the site only survives through donations.
One day two detectives from the LA Police Department pay McEvoy a visit. He’s a “person of interest” in the murder of a woman with whom he’d had a one-night stand after they met at a bar.
MvEvoy’s DNA ultimately clears him, but his investigative instincts are irrepressibly aroused after he talks to a friend of the victim whom he’d tracked down. The friend says that the victim had felt that a person she thought she’d casually met at a place where pickups are common seemed to know a lot about her. (The victim was killed brutally by what’s known as “internal decapitation;” in other words, her neck had been twisted 180 degrees.)
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. As our hero delves into the sinister world of the Dark Web, he learns that each of the Shrike’s victims had used a particular ancestry-tracing site called GT23.
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!
©2015 Stephen Webster
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 backseat 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 a sympathetic figure; readers root for him.
This story begins with Haller celebrating a big courtroom victory—the drinks are on him, even though he himself gave up booze years before. On the way home he’s stopped by a police officer. Haller thinks it’s a DUI check; instead, he’s arrested for first-degree 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 who would bilk people by setting up a phony charity website after a disaster, like an earthquake, and keep the donated money. Haller represented him 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.”
Even more daunting, Haller has to direct things from the slammer, hardly a conducive environment for such a mission, the noise is unending and he must continually look over his shoulder for prisoners who might do him harm. Given his reputation as a hard-driving and successful 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, surprisingly, are the bus trips to the courthouse.
Haller shocks the prosecution by calling for a speedy trial, instead of the normal defense practice of trying to draw things out. He doesn’t want to rot in jail, awaiting trial, but the fee he’d have to pay to make bail could bankrupt him. Connelly gives readers an enlightening tutorial on how the bail system operates.
Haller mobilizes characters familiar to fans of previous Lincoln novels, including his half-brother Harry Bosch, memorable star of Connelly’s first legendary series. Our hero needs all the help he can get, as the story involves the FBI, corruption in the LA sheriffs’ office and an organized-crime conspiracy to bilk the government. (By the way, Harry Bosch, is the subject of a riveting Amazon Prime television series—called Bosch, naturally. Leave aside plenty of time: Once you tune in, you won’t want to stop viewing, episode after episode.)
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