For over a year now a lot of us have been working from home, and now I feel like a real rube because what I should have done was get a Lincoln and havFor over a year now a lot of us have been working from home, and now I feel like a real rube because what I should have done was get a Lincoln and have somebody drive me around all day while I did my job.
Mick Haller is a defense attorney who uses his car as an office as he shuttles between courts and jails seeing various clients. While not not completely crooked, Mick is certainly bent, and he has no problem using every trick he knows to keep his clients out of prison. When a wealthy young man is accused of brutally assualting a woman during an attempted rape, he hires Haller and insists that he’s innocent despite the evidence. At first, Mick sees this new client as nothing more than a big pay day, but as new things come to light Mick finds himself personally involved in ways he could never have dreamed of.
I’ve got a weird thing going with Michael Connelly. He’s an incredibly popular crime writer, and I’m a guy who loves crime fiction. His ideas and characters seem like they should be right in my wheelhouse, and this is another example of that. Yet, despite having several of my reading buddies cite Connelly as a favorite of theirs I remain mostly immune to his charms. Which is weird because I like plenty of other books that are similar in tone and concepts to what Connelly does. I guess it’s just like J.K. Simmons said in Whiplash, it’s not quite my tempo.
So while I enjoyed this one and found the character of Mick Haller intriguing, I just kind of wish that there was something MORE to the book, even if I couldn’t tell you exactly what it is I found lacking. I guess one point was that I was more into the angles that Haller played in the early part of the book than I was once the main plot got rolling. In fairness, the whole last act does hinge on Haller pulling off an unorthodox courtroom stunt so it’s not like Connelly just forgot that Haller was a lawyer. It’s more like he got more interested in the crime plot than the character, and so I wished Mick was a little bit less of a standard male lead in a thriller and more sleazy lawyer in the last act.
Still, I got no major complaints, and it’s got some aspects I really liked....more
I’ve never seen the old TV show with Raymond Burr, but general pop culture awareness has told me thatI’ve been very confused about Perry Mason lately.
I’ve never seen the old TV show with Raymond Burr, but general pop culture awareness has told me that Mason was a defense lawyer whose clients were always innocent, and that he’d get them acquitted by figuring out the true guilty party who Mason would then get to confess on the stand. So I was a little shocked when I watched the new HBO series in which Mason as played by Matthew Rhys wasn’t even a lawyer at the start, but rather a small-time drunken private investigator who gets embroiled in the case of a murdered infant and has to navigate a web of crime and corruption to try and find some shred of justice.
I decided to go to the source to try and figure out what the real skinny is on this Perry Mason guy, and I checked out the book that started it all way back in 1933. What’s the verdict? It seems like Mason was a lot closer to the HBO version.
Mason gets hired by a woman who needs his help to keep her name out of a tabloid newspaper after she and a politically connected male friend who wasn’t her husband have gotten caught up in a situation that could turn into a scandal. Even though the lady is lying about who she is, Perry takes the case, but when he starts digging and finds out who really owns the paper things get messy in a hurry.
What’s really interesting to me is Mason’s role at the start of this. Although he is an attorney he also comes across as a fixer/bag man/detective. His opening move is to try and bribe and bully the editor of the paper into silence, but then he shifts tactics immediately to using the opportunity to track down the owner of the paper. Along the way he does things like bribe hotel phone operators and a cop, he pretty much extorts extra cash out of the male companion who was with the woman to keep his name out of it, he hides from the police at one point, he coaches a person at a crime scene on what part of their story to lie about, and he pretends to be somebody else so that he can accept a legally executed subpoena to that person in order to get information. I’m not an attorney, but I think those kinds of things are generally frowned upon.
The amusing part is that Mason comes across as a real sonofabitch. He’s all bluster and bullying while doing everything he can to dominate every conversation, and most of his conversations with his assistant Della Street and his investigator Paul Drake consists of him barking orders. It doesn’t make him the most likable protagonist, but he is probably what you’d want from your lawyer when your ass was in a crack because his one core belief is that he owes his client his full efforts no matter what they’ve done.
There’s some distinctly dated elements to it with Mason’s attitude towards the women in the story being horrid by today’s standards, and there’s an outright racial slur at one point by one of the characters that nobody seems bothered by.
Despite that and Mason not exactly being a guy who I’d like to hang out with, it’s a pretty solid mystery that has the hard boiled atmosphere of a Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novel. ...more
At some point we’re all going to have to agree on a statute of limitation on spoilers. When is it fair game to give away an ending? Because Presumed IAt some point we’re all going to have to agree on a statute of limitation on spoilers. When is it fair game to give away an ending? Because Presumed Innocent was published in 1988 and a pretty popular movie version with Harrison Ford came out in 1990. It’s almost impossible to summarize the sequel Innocent without giving at least some of the first one away. On the other hand, you’ve had 20 years to read the book or see the movie. Don’t blame me for your laziness.
So in the interest of going spoiler-free for any who might be interested, here’s a quickie round-up of the book. Scott Turow basically invented the modern legal thriller in Presumed Innocent, opening the door for John Grisham and Law & Order to turn us all into amateur lawyers. Turow is less concerned with the tricks of the trade for criminal law in this one, and focuses even more on characters. Once again, he tells the story of a trial while revealing much but letting us know that there‘s more to the story than we‘re seeing in the court room. If you’re in the mood for a legal whodunit with strong characters struggling with the consequences of their secrets, this is the book for you.
If you don’t mind some mild spoilers of the first book, you can keep reading. I’m not giving away anything that isn’t on the Innocent book jacket. Otherwise, stop here if you want to remain 100% spoiler free.
Twenty years after being accused of raping and killing the lover he was cheating on his wife with, Rusty Sabich has managed to put a respectable life back together. He is still with his wife, and is the chief justice for a court of appeals. You’d think that having one affair that nearly resulted in him being convicted of murder would have taught Rusty a lesson, but turning 60 and being unhappy with the state of his marriage to his bi-polar wife leads him to an affair with a much younger woman who worked for him. Eighteen months later, Rusty’s wife dies in her sleep, but Rusty is behaving strangely. Soon, the prosecuting attorney is trying to figure out if he should charge Rusty with murder.
The story shifts through several viewpoints from Rusty, his mistress Anna, his son Nat, and the prosecutor. As in Presumed Innocent, Turow does a great job of letting us get to know the characters while keeping the central mystery intact. Even though Rusty is the narrator for a large portion of the book, we know that he isn’t telling the whole story, and it’s quality writing that makes you sympathize with him even as you’re not entirely sure what kind of man he really is.
I also loved how Turow never gives away the biggest secret revealed in the first book while letting it hang over this one. You could read this without having read Presumed Innocent and still enjoy it quite a bit. However, knowing that ending while reading this puts a whole other dimension into the story.
This was a sequel worth waiting over 20 years for....more
It seems like a particularly cruel joke that Steig Larsson died shortly after getting a deal to publish his MillenLisbeth Salander, we hardly knew ye.
It seems like a particularly cruel joke that Steig Larsson died shortly after getting a deal to publish his Millennium Trilogy. Would he have continued on with these tales of Salander and journalist Mikeal Blomkvist if he would have lived? Unless the rumors are true about Larsson’s long-time girlfriend having a laptop with a fourth book saved on it stuck in a safety deposit box somewhere as she fights with his family over the cash cow this series has become, we gotta assume that this is the last we’ll see of Larsson’s dynamic duo. And it is a crying shame because Salander has quickly become one of my all-time favorite characters.
This one picks up almost immediately after the events of The Girl Who Played With Fire, and I can’t say much about the plot without spoiling that one. (Anyone interested in this series should read them in order if at all possible.) As the title indicates, Salander started an almighty shit storm in the last book. The anti-social, brilliant, violent, revenge-driven hacker has managed to kick off a constitutional crisis that shocks the Swedish government to the very highest levels and threatens numerous deserving douche bags with exposure of past crimes. Atta girl, Lisbeth!
Meanwhile, Blomkvist recruits a number of unlikely allies as he tries to save Lisbeth by publishing her true story as he plays a variety of dangerous cat-and-mouse games with the people trying to shut her up for good. Of course, his biggest headache will be convincing the pain-in-the-ass Salander to cooperate in trying to save herself.
Oddly enough, each book in the trilogy reads like a different type of genre story. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a traditional whodunit mystery with modern twists. The Girl Who Played With Fire was more of a fast-paced action thriller. And this one reads more like a legal suspense novel, including an incredible trial scene. There’s an overall arc to the three books with events from the first one not paying off until near the end of this one, but they have three distinct personalities.
Despite being over 550 pages, it reads quickly, but it isn’t flawless. There’s a sub-plot with Blomkvist’s friend and sometime lover Erika Berger being the victim of a stalker as she struggles with a new job as a newspaper editor that seems out of place with the rest of the book.
And there’s two other things holding this novel back. First is that the heart of the these books is the character of Salander. While Blomkvist and the supporting characters are all engaging enough, it’s Lisbeth that made these books a cut above the normal mystery/crime thrillers. But circumstances here keep Salander out of the main action for most of the story. It’s a shame that we didn’t get more of her in Larsson’s last book.
Second, even though Salander and Blomkvist are the main characters, in the three books, they’ve only got to work together directly for about half of one novel. They get very few scenes together other than that, and that odd couple aspect was a great part of the first book and their unlikely friendship is a key driver to the plots of all three novels so it’s weird to realize that they spent more time apart than together.
Despite these points, I still loved these books and their slightly off-beat structure. I only wish that Steig Larsson was alive and sitting in Sweden on a pile of money as he churned out more of these terrific thrillers...more
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