When I was in junior high and high school, I was convinced that I wanted to be a lawyer. I watched L.A. Law religiously, read books like Presumed Innocent and The Firm, and just generally soaked up any cultural experience that had to do with lawyers. Needless to say, that phase passed just a few short years later, and I pretty much went out of my way to avoid Turow, Grisham, and popular legal shows like Ally McBeal and The Practice.

So I don’t know what it was exactly that made me pick up The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly a couple weeks ago. I had never heard of either the book or the author before, but I was intrigued by the title. At first I thought it might have something to do with Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president of the United States, but after seeing the black Lincoln Continental on the cover, I immediately knew I was wrong. At any rate, I decided to give the book a chance.

The main character is a defense attorney named Michael “Mickey” Haller, and in the first part of the book Connelly spends a good deal of time showing the reader how Haller operates. He has connections throughout L.A. County, including bail bondsmen, TV cameramen, and private investigators, which helps him secure clients, get information that he needs, and basically just work the system to his advantage. In other words, Haller comes off like a stereotypical “ambulance chaser” in the opening chapters.

According to Connelly, what Haller and all mid-level defense attorneys dream of is a client called a “franchise player.” This is the term used for a rich client whose defense costs in a big case would easily run into the six figures. That would certainly be a change for Haller, since his current clients seem to consist of drug addicts, prostitutes, and motorcycle gang members with varying abilities to pay their fees.

As it turns out, Haller gets a lead on a potential franchise player in one Louis Ross Roulet. Roulet has been accused of breaking into a woman’s apartment with the intent to rape and kill her. He allegedly got as far as beating her brutally before she somehow escaped and called the police. Roulet insists that he was set up because the woman is after the money she could get in her civil suit. Roulet’s story of how and why he was at the woman’s apartment, coupled with some inconsistencies in the woman’s story and some blemishes in her background, give Haller just enough to think that maybe Roulet is innocent after all. The rest of the novel deals with the way Haller investigates the Roulet case and mounts a defense for his client.

Overall, I thought the book was pretty good. It wasn’t anything fantastic, but it was entertaining enough to make me think that I had made a mistake by leaving off with legal thrillers all those years ago. The plot moved along pretty quickly, there were plenty of twists and turns, and I didn’t figure out what was really happening in the story until very close to the ending. So all in all, I was satisfied with The Lincoln Lawyer and rate it 7.0 stars out of 10.