Un libro che letteralmente si divora, diviso tra colpi di scena e il progredire di un processo, del quale Connelly ci illustra magistralmente tutte le fasi.
Quasi un piccolo trattato di procedura penale americana.
Confluiscono nella trama i personaggi di Mickey Haller, Harry Bosch e Jack McEvoy, già apparsi in precedenti altri romanzi.
Imperdibile per gli appassionati di "legal thriller"!

One of Connelly's best and a very fast read. The story emerged well and held together with LA being a steady stage for Haller and Bosch. Never over done. Even the court proceedings only dragged a little. The Germans and Kindler were rough patches. But I see and hear Garcia-Rulfo and Welliver when I am reading and they work great. The ending was a complete surprise. I hope they work together again. ( )

When lawyer Jerry Vincent is murdered, Mickey Haller inherits his caseload that includes defending the charge of murder against a powerful Hollywood executive. And while the plot is top notch, Connelly adds to the gripping story by making the courtroom scenes fascinating. Of the Connelly novels that I’ve read so far this is my favourite. I am looking forward to reading more in the series. ( )

(2008)2nd novel that concentrates on Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer. He inherits all of the clients of a murdered lawyer and is handed a huge case of celebrity murder. Turns out that the fix is in on the jury & he is teamed with Harry Bosch to try to sort it out. Story is OK but after reading Elizabeth George, this seems a big step down in quality of writing; an author compared to a writer.From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley Graham Greene liked to distinguish between his serious novels and those he called his "entertainments," though given the complexity of the man and his work it wasn't always easy for readers to draw the distinction. Probably Michael Connelly would be the last to compare himself with Greene, but he, too, writes at differing levels of seriousness. If at first encounter he seems primarily an exceptionally accomplished writer of crime novels, at closer examination he is also a mordant and knowing chronicler of the world in which crime takes place, i.e., our world. Three years ago, within the space of only a few months, Connelly published two novels notable for the serious business underlying the entertainment. The first, The Closers, published in May 2005, found his noted Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch trying to solve a "cold case" and thus trying to bring justice to victims on whom the law has turned its back. Then, in October of the same year, he published The Lincoln Lawyer, his first novel told from a lawyer's point of view, about an ambulance chaser named Mickey Haller, who, in the course of pursuing a lucrative case, finds himself seeking justice for a man he believes he failed to represent fairly when his case was being heard. Now, in The Brass Verdict, Connelly brings Bosch and Haller together for the first time. Though the novel has some serious things to say about the workings, and occasional failures, of the jury system, it is primarily an entertainment, and more than welcome purely as such. It's narrated by Mickey, a criminal-defense lawyer who is just coming off a year's self-imposed sabbatical -- he'd been shot in the gut and then had become addicted to painkillers in various forms -- and plans to ease slowly back into his practice. He's no K Street lawyer, as he tells a young man he takes on as his driver: "I haven't had an office since I left the Public Defenders Office twelve years ago. My car is my office. I've got two other Lincolns just like this one. I keep them in rotation. Each one's got a printer, a fax and I've got a wireless card in my computer. Anything I have to do in an office I can do back here while I'm on the road to the next place. There are more than forty courthouses spread across L.A. County. Being mobile is the best way to do business." Mickey's hopes of easing back in are quickly deep-sixed when a lawyer he's known slightly, Jerry Vincent, is found murdered in his car. He and Vincent had worked the occasional case together but hadn't been close. Still, Mickey is called into the office of the chief judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court and informed that Vincent "filed a motion with the court ten years ago that allowed for the transfer of his practice to you should he become incapacitated or deceased." Most of the 31 active cases in Vincent's file are minor stuff, but one is huge: "Walter Elliot . . . was the chairman/owner of Archway Pictures and a very powerful man in Hollywood. He had been charged with murdering his wife and her lover in a fit of rage after discovering them together in a Malibu beach house. The case had all sorts of connections to sex and celebrity and was drawing wide media attention. It had been a publicity machine for Vincent and now it would go up for grabs." Obviously, Mickey would love to have the case, but first he has to persuade Elliot -- who most emphatically is not a nice man -- to take him on. Once he does, Mickey is off and running. One of the people he runs into is Bosch, who is back on the active force and investigating Vincent's murder. Bosch wants access to Vincent's past and present case files because he believes the murderer was a client who'd crossed swords with him, but Mickey refuses on the grounds that to release the information would violate lawyer/client confidentiality. Bosch has 33 years on the force and is "a man on a mission" to seek justice wherever he can find it. He's a tough cop and an honest one, and there are angry sparks between him and Mickey from the moment they first meet. Mickey would just as soon have nothing to do with Harry -- Connelly's faithful readers don't have to be told that his real name is Hieronymus, "like the painter" -- but there's a problem: The deeper both men dig into Vincent's past, the more suspicions are raised. Vincent had received a lot of money, presumably from Elliot, and much of it -- $100,000, to be precise -- had disappeared. Mickey says Vincent claimed that "he needed the money to buy a boat and that if he made the deal in cash, he would get the best deal and save a lot of money," to which Harry replies: "There is no boat. The story was a lie." Vincent "bought something," Harry says, "and your client Walter Elliot probably knows what it was" -- something, for starters, like a potential juror. "You should take it as a warning, Counselor," Harry continues. When Mickey scoffs, he says, "His lawyer got killed, not him. Think about it. And remember, that little trickle on the back of your neck and running down your spine? That's the feeling you get when you know you have to look over your shoulder. When you know you're in danger." Mickey doesn't want to be scared, but as things unfold it appears he doesn't have much choice. One of those things is, how much -- if at all -- can he trust his client? Walter Elliot loudly and frequently proclaims his innocence and insists he wants a speedy trial to clear his name as rapidly as possibly, but though Mickey wants to believe him, experience teaches him to be cautious: "Over the years I had represented and been in the company of a couple dozen killers. The one rule is that there are no rules. They come in all sizes and shapes, rich and poor, humble and arrogant, regretful and cold to the bone. The percentages told me that it was most likely Elliot was a killer. That he had calmly dispatched his wife and her lover and arrogantly thought he could and would get away with it. But there was nothing about him on first meeting that told me one way or the other for sure. And that's the way it always was." If you're beginning to get a whiff of the O.J. Simpson case, well, that's pretty obviously how Connelly planned it. Not merely is the accused murderer a Los Angeles celebrity and the victims his wife and her lover, but Connelly drops in the occasional teasing reference as well. When Elliot blusters in court that "the sooner Mr. Haller gets to prove my innocence to the world, the better," Mickey dismisses it as "O.J. 101," and when another lawyer offers to pitch in and help, Mickey tells him: "He wants only one lawyer at the table. . . . He said no dream team." But all of that is just a little juice on the side; the main story is strictly Connelly's. The essence of it is this, as Mickey puts it: "I was defending a man I believed was innocent of the murders he was charged with but complicit in the reason they had occurred. I had a sleeper on the jury whose placement was directly related to the murder of my predecessor. And I had a detective watching over me whom I was holding back on and couldn't be sure was considering my safety ahead of his own desire to break open the case." Yet how does Mickey feel? "I felt like a guy flipping a three-hundred-pound sled in midair. It might not be a sport but it was dangerous as hell and it did what I hadn't been able to do in more than a year's time. It shook off the rust and put the charge back in my blood." Mickey is pumped, and, take my word for it, you will be too. Even though the way it ends is just a wee bit contrived, it's still a terrific ride.

As I wrote in the review for the first book in this series, The Lincoln Lawyer, I ended up reading the first three volumes back to back, which enhanced my experience with the continued journey of this new-to-me character.

On the heels of the final twist in book 1, where Mickey Haller was shot and seriously injured, we find the Lincoln Lawyer trying to pick up the pieces of his life: the injury resulted in his addiction to painkillers and that reflected quite negatively on his work. Imagine his surprise when he’s called by a judge who informs him of the murder of former colleague Jerry Vincent, who listed Mickey as his successor in the case of his premature death: suddenly saddled with a heavy caseload, in which a news-worthy murder trial stands out prominently, Haller decides that he will do his best to swim instead of sinking and launches himself bodily into what looks like a new lease in life.

The big case is a complicated one: movie producer Walter Elliot is accused of having murdered his wife and her lover when he discovered them in bed in the Elliots’ Malibu house. The man protests his innocence, and indeed the evidence is more circumstantial than anything else, but his overbearing attitude keeps grating on Mickey’s nerves and makes it more difficult than usual to maintain the emotional detachment he needs as a defense attorney. Moreover, it looks as if Jerry Vincent’s murder was tied to one of his pending cases, and Haller is not sure which one it was since the colleague’s important notes were in the briefcase that was stolen after he was killed, so Mickey must also keep watching behind his back for a potential threat to his life. As an added burden, the investigation for the Vincent case has been assigned to a certain Harry Bosch, and the two men clash immediately when having to tread the difficult waters of investigative needs versus client confidentiality, and it takes some time before the lawyer and the detective are able to find some common ground, and some mutual respect, that will allow them to do their respective jobs.

One of the qualities I most enjoy in Michael Connelly’s works is his ability to keep his characters in constant evolution from book to book, which confers them an added depth and a great deal of believability. Haller starts at a great disadvantage here, because he’s emerging from the tunnel of addiction and is trying very hard to regain the confidence of his first wife and their daughter, and also because he’s unsure about his grasp on the courtroom skills which served him so well in the past: Connelly’s main characters are flawed individuals driven to do their best in their line of work, and that drive sometimes leads them to tunnel vision, and yet that makes them more human and more approachable than the average book characters.

I particularly enjoyed the juxtaposition between Haller and Bosch here: where Haller is gifted with a good deal of quirky humor - more often than not aimed at himself - we get to understand him better as someone who knows all the nooks and crannies of the legal system and knows how to use them to his advantage, while the external focus on Bosch as another character rather than the protagonist shows us the sullen, antagonistic personality of the proverbial dog with a bone. In a way, they are similarly dedicated to their mission - Haller to his clients, Bosch to the victims - but their first encounter on the opposite sides of the fence is of course bound to ignite some fiery sparks: it will take a while, and some intriguing developments, for the two of them to realize that they might work for the same goal, even if they take different roads to get there. And of course the discovery of their connection - they are half brothers on their father’s side - does help in bridging part of the gap…

Story-wise, The Brass Verdict is your typical Connelly story, one that starts in a leisurely manner but gains speed and momentum as information and discoveries pile up and the tension increases along with the personal stakes: it’s interesting to note that the first words of the novel are “everybody lies”, which means that it would be better not to take anything we read at face value. Where Harry Bosch knows very well that felons lie (and sometimes even victims do…), we learn that indeed everybody - police officers, lawyers, witnesses, even judges - do lie when situations and their own interests are involved, so you can expect a good number of narrative twists and turns in this story. What positively surprised me in this new series, is that the courtroom drama can be as gripping and intriguing as any police investigation, since Michael Connelly shows here that his knowledge of the legal system is just as broad as that of police procedures: it takes great skills to keep courtroom back-and-forth as lively as a spirited car chase along the avenues of Los Angeles, and the author shows those skills quite well here - as an example, what might otherwise have been a mundane proceeding as that of jury selection is turned here into an intriguing look into applied psychology and mental fencing between prosecution and defense.

The Brass Verdict confirmed me that I have another winner in this series, and even though my TBR hardly needed it, I’m quite happy to have added it to my reading materials. ( )