The Lincoln Lawyer Still Has Gas in the Tank
The Proving Ground – Michael Connelly’s eighth Lincoln Lawyer novel – should serve to prove two things about the prodigious crime novelist, one of which is easy to forget.
The most obvious thing is that research is the hallmark of Connelly’s work. The creator of Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller excels at the other aspects of the crime novel, but his plots and new characters have been hit and miss in the past half-decade. His research, on the other hand, never flags. His exposition on the California justice system in particular is always informative and fascinating.
The less obvious point is that Connelly is really good at writing about technology. It may surprise some because Bosch, his most famous hero, is a purebred technophobe and it seems logical that Connelly would be as well. Nothing could be further from the truth. Connelly has proven repeatedly throughout his career that he can write about innovation with the best of them.
He certainly does in The Proving Ground. In this technothriller, published last month, Haller is representing Brenda Randolph, a widow whose teenage daughter Rebecca was shot and killed outside her school. There’s no question about who murdered her. It was her former boyfriend, Aaron Colton. The issue to be litigated is whether an artificial intelligence company called Tidalwaiv is responsible for the tragedy.
Rumored to be a takeover target by tech giants, Tidalwaiv’s main product is an AI-driven app called Clair that lets users customize their own digital sidekicks. Using Clair, young Colton devised his own dreamboat, a voluptuous digital maven called Wren, who is completely obsequious, reaffirming and flattering. She even goes so far as to suggest to Aaron that it’s all right to murder the girl who just dumped him.
“Aaron Colton killed my client’s daughter because of an AI chatbot that went rogue,” Haller says to his ex-wife, the District Attorney Maggie McPherson. “You’re putting the kid away, but what about the company that made the app with no thought of the consequences of unleashing it on impressionable minds?”
It’s a clever situational plot, and Connelly carries it off with aplomb, largely because of his research. As you’d expect, he masters the rules and processes of the courtroom, and he really shows his braininess in describing new technology – its functions and ramifications, and the culture that has grown up around it.
It’s nothing new for Connelly. He’s always been great at finding interesting technologies and writing about them. The example that springs to mind is Chasing the Dime, the 2002 stand-alone novel in which protagonist Henry Pierce leads a startup developing nano-computing to be used in healthcare.
But even the Bosch novels are rich with examples of Connelly exciting the reader by describing wonderful innovations. In his second novel, The Black Ice in 1993, he revealed an operation in which Mediterranean fruit flies are bred in huge numbers, then sterilized through radiation and released into the wild. The idea is that these sterile males would mate with wild females, resulting in no offspring – a real-world pest-control method known as the Sterile Insect Technique.
Connelly researched radioactive isotopes used in cancer treatment in The Overlook in 2007. In The Closers (2005), he details the advances in three technologies -- DNA, ballistics and fingerprinting – that allowed cold case units to find murders years after the crimes were committed. And in Angels Flight (1999), Harry Bosch and his team dive into a technology new to the world at the time – the internet and the World Wide Web.
Connelly usually doesn’t use technology as simple embellishment for his stories. Innovative products are woven right into the fabric of the tale – and that is certainly the case in The Proving Ground. Without casting AI as a dystopian threat to humanity, Connelly delivers an earnest and intelligent examination of the dangers of the technology and whether its developers and overseers are setting up the necessary guardrails.
And the vehicle for this discussion is a solid novel that holds the reader’s attention throughout. Connelly avoided his recent preference for jumbling several plots into a single volume, meaning this book offers a good story line – good but not great.
It’s not that the story is void of tension. It’s that there isn’t enough of it. Haller is never really in personal danger. The ending doesn’t end with a whimper, but its bang is certainly muted. The story arc never reaches the altitudes of the early Bosch or Haller novels.
Another problem with this book is that Connelly’s writing seems a bit sloppy. He let his fans know in January that he was going back to rewrite the novel because he had to incorporate the wildfires that had just consumed swaths of Los Angeles. It was too big an event for the chronicler of modern L.A. to ignore. Kudos to him. However, the book needed another thorough edit.
Haller says he’d never met Jack McEvoy before. (The journalist and hero of The Poet works with Haller on the Tidalwaiv case.) But the two had chatted, however briefly, in previous books. Haller and McPherson discuss Maddie Bosch as if they barely knew her, when in fact Maddie was extremely close to their own daughter. There are several instances in which the obsessive Connelly fan finds something out of whack.
The text is replete with these minor annoyances, but they are minor. Overall, this is a really good book that will please Connelly’s legion of fans. In fact, there’s a third thing that this book proves: in the 2020s, Haller books are better than Bosch books. Bosch will always be Connelly’s finest creation. But as the years go by, Connelly doesn’t quite know what to do with his aging homicide detective. Not so with Mickey Haller. Resurrection Walk in 2023 was a fantastic novel, and The Proving Ground shows the Lincoln Lawyer still has some gas in the tank.
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Peter Moreira’s latest novel is the technothriller Presidio Biotech. He is also the author of The Haight Mystery Series — retro mystery novels set in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Go to my home page to join my mailing list and receive a free prequel novella.
