Michael Connelly

The Lincoln Lawyer: A Novel

Michael Connelly

• 2006 Macavity-Novel winner
• 2006 Shamus-Novel winner
• 2006 Anthony-Novel nominee
• 2006 Edgar–Novel nominee
• 2006 Steel Dagger shortlist
• 2005 LATimes–Mystery finalist
• Score: 44.56

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 defense pro who operates out of the backseat of his Lincoln Town Car, to defend the 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 bikers 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.

City of Bones

Michael Connelly

• 2003 Anthony-Novel winner
• 2003 Barry-Novel winner
• 2003 Edgar–Novel nominee
• 2003 Macavity-Novel nominee
• 2002 Dagger shortlist
• Score: 38.53

When the bones of a 12-year-old boy are found scattered in the Hollywood Hills, Harry Bosch is drawn into a case that brings up the darkest memories from his own haunted past. The bones have been buried for years, but the cold case doesn’t deter Bosch. Unearthing hidden stories, he finds the child’s identity and reconstructs his fractured life, determined that he not be forgotten.

At the same time, a new love affair with a female cop begins to blossom for Bosch-until a stunningly blown mission leaves Bosch in more trouble that ever before in his turbulent career. The investigation races to a shocking conclusion and leaves Bosch on the brink of an unimaginable decision-one that will leave readers hungrily awaiting Michael Connelly’s next masterpiece.

Blood Work

Michael Connelly

• 1999 Anthony-Novel winner
• 1999 Macavity-Novel winner
• 1999 Barry-Novel nominee
• 1999 Edgar–Novel nominee
• Score: 32.49

Blood Work—that’s what Terrell McCaleb used to call his job at the FBI. Until a heart condition forced him to take early retirement, he headed all investigations of serial murders in the Los Angeles area. Now he is recovering from a heart transplant operation and leads a quiet life. But McCaleb’s calm seas turn rough when a story in the L.A. Times brings him face-to-face with Graciela Rivers, a darkly intriguing woman who hooks him with the story of her sister’s unsolved murder. Against doctor’s orders and his own better judgement, McCaleb agrees to take up the case. Soon Terry is on the trail of a killer whose crimes are more baffling and horrifying than anything he has ever encountered. It’s a mind-bending, breakneck case that leads McCaleb into the darkest place he’s ever known, unsure whether he even wants to survive his own investigation.

Trunk Music: A Harry Bosch Novel

Michael Connelly

• 1998 Barry-Novel winner
• 1998 Macavity-Novel nominee
• 1997 Hammett nominee
• Score: 22.48

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’s glovebox—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.

The Brass Verdict

Michael Connelly

• 2009 Anthony-Novel winner
• 2009 Steel Dagger shortlist
• Score: 16.59

Things are finally looking up for defense attorney Mickey Haller. After two years of wrong turns, Haller is back in 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 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.

Bringing together Michael Connelly’s two most popular characters, The Brass Verdict is sure to be his biggest book yet.

The Poet

Michael Connelly

• 1997 Anthony-Novel winner
• 1996 Hammett nominee
• Score: 16.47

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 Black Echo: A Harry Bosch Novel

Michael Connelly

• 1993 Edgar-1st Novel winner
• 1993 Hammett nominee
• Score: 16.43

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 horror 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 and seductive female FBI agent, pitted against enemies inside 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 Last Coyote: A Harry Bosch Novel

Michael Connelly

• 1996 Anthony-Novel nominee
• 1995 Hammett nominee
• Score: 12.46

Harry Bosch’s life is a mess. His new 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 twelve, 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 later the smell of a coverup 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…

Echo Park: A Harry Bosch Novel

Michael Connelly

• 2006 LATimes–Mystery winner
• Score: 10.56

Detective Harry Bosch reopens one of his own unsolved cases and comes face to face with a psychotic killer he has been seeking for years. A thrilling new novel by the author of the #1 bestseller The Lincoln Lawyer.

In 1995 Marie Gesto disappeared after walking out of a supermarket. Harry Bosch worked the case but couldn’t crack it, and the 22-year-old woman was never found. Now Bosch is in the Open-Unsolved Unit, where he still keeps the Gesto file on his desk, when the DA calls. A man accused of two heinous killings is willing to come clean about several others, including the murder of Marie Gesto.

Bosch must now take the confession of the man he has sought—and hated—for eleven years. But when Bosch learns that he and his partner missed a clue back in 1995 that could have led them to Gesto’s killer—and stopped nine murders that followed—his whole being as a cop begins to crack.

Michael Connelly’s enthralling new novel pits the detective People magazine calls “one of the most complex crime fighters around” against one of the most sadistic killers he has ever confronted.

A Darkness More Than Night

Michael Connelly

• 2002 Barry-Novel nominee
• Score: 6.52

Terrence McCaleb is asked by the LAPD to help them investigate a series of murders that have them baffled. They are the kind of ritualized killings that McCaleb specialized in solving with the FBI, and he is reluctantly drawn from his peaceful new life back into the horror and excitement of tracking down a terrifying homicidal maniac. More horrifying still, the suspect who seems to fit the profile that McCaleb develops is someone he has known and worked with in the past: Detective Harry Bosch.

A Darkness More Than Night is a fresh and lightning-paced excursion into the dark side of Los Angeles and the hidden corners of the human heart, by a writer hailed by the Los Angeles Times as one of the top rank of a new generation of crime writers.