THE LAW OF INNOCENCE
by Michael Connelly
Little, Brown, $29.00, November, 2020
Rating: A

Reviewed by George Easter
In this, the sixth Mickey Haller legal thriller, we find Mickey having just celebrated another court victory when he is pulled over by a cop who notices what looks like blood dripping from the trunk of Mickey’s car. Yep, you guessed it: there’s a dead body in there playing trunk music and Mickey is arrested for murder.
We, the readers know he is innocent, but there is a lot of evidence against him – as well as a fierce prosecutor who is hell bent to put Mickey away. He decides to represent himself but is hampered by being put in jail with an exorbitantly high bail to reach, so he must prepare his defense while incarcerated.
Legal machinations fill a large part of this book and they did not slow the plot a bit. All of it was fascinating. The resolution comes a little bit out of left field, but that is a minor quibble. I read this almost non-stop in a period of less than 24 hours – the only interruption was a necessary visit to my sister who has been ill. As soon as I got home I sat down and finished it. This is not unusual behavior for me with a Michael Connelly book. He’s simply the best – the gold standard for relentlessly paced, page-turning reads. 2020 might be a disaster in too many ways to mention, but two Michael Connelly books in the same year does a lot to mitigate the pain — at least for the time it takes to read them.