The Fifth Witness by Michael Connelly

Reading The Fifth Witness is like riding on the back of an expert downhill racer. Connelly keeps the narrative fast-paced but the speed is always in control, and no details get skipped. The plot is complex and Connelly takes the reader through it with as much clarity as speed. Mickey Haller is a protagonist you can’t help but like, and this is a book you just can't walk away from until it's over.

In The Fifth Witness, Mickey Haller (also the protagonist in The Lincoln Lawyer), has shifted with the times, and focused his practice on foreclosure cases. As you might imagine, he has plenty of clients. One of them, Lisa Trammel, has turned her predicament into a cause, setting up a website, leading pickets, and offering sound bites to the media about the bank that is foreclosing on her, and one of its officers in particular. When that bank officer is found dead, the police, not illogically, arrest Lisa. It would be nice if the client was as likable as her attorney, but she isn’t. Despite evidence that she possesses some degree of intellectual faculty, throughout the case Trammel behaves like a three-year-old denied an ice cream cone. It's hard to get behind her.

For the most part, the characters behave consistently and believably. Mickey is a nice guy with a hard edge, and the nice guy wins out in a choice that seemed improbable, unless Mickey is not worried at all about being sued for malpractice. This was not a decision that made any kind of sense, and I wonder when in the future it will come around and bite Haller in the ass.

Not a bunny trail: The criminal defense attorney used to be, in reality and in fiction, a respected part of the legal machine, not only necessary but honorable. There are two ways of saying it. One is that the criminal defense attorney is all that stands between the accused and conviction. If you assume that accusation = guilt and therefore only the guilty are indicted, then you might tend to see the criminal defense attorney as almost an aider and abettor of criminal activity. The second way to say it that the defense attorney acts as a protector of the Constitution in that s/he sees to it that Constitutional principles are adhered to in all aspects of the trial, without regard to factual guilt or innocence.

In any trial, both the prosecution and the defense work to answer the same question: Can twelve jurors be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of the guilt of the defendant based on the evidence ruled admissible under in that jurisdiction? If the prosecution succeeds, the defendant will be convicted. The defense attorney’s duty is to highlight every inconsistency, every gap in logic, to find all reasonable alternative interpretations and present them to the jury, and argue alternate theories of the crime, even if it means making your secretary spend her lunch hour running through mud in high heels at the crime scene. No, wait. That was Perry Mason. Never mind about the high heels. It is inevitable in that scenario that on occasion a person who is actually guilty will be acquitted, just as it is inevitable that on occasion a person who is actually innocent of the charge will be convicted. Mickey Haller does his job ingeniously, and the title of the book is a clue to his defense endgame. Where Richard North Patterson would delve profoundly and with keen insight into the psyches of the characters, and Scott Turow would focus on the elegant details of the legal system, Connelly keeps the story moving by focusing on what the characters do. We come to know the characters through their behavior, just like in real life. Strategy is central to Haller's management of the case, but we have to wait to see it play out in the courtroom.

As happens rarely in books of this genre, Mickey Haller and his team are changed by the events of this narrative. The reader does not leave Mickey where s/he found him – Mickey Haller isn’t Perry Mason. It takes courage to shift a leading character in this fashion, and Connelly does it like a master. In fact, it almost slips your mind that the sudden changes in direction are being taken by a man with a long history as a criminal defense attorney, a man who spent years defending drug dealers, actual and/or alleged.

It will be interesting to see where future installments take Mickey Haller and those around him.

You can go and see the film version of The Lincoln Lawyer opening in theaters around the US tomorrow. I wanted to embed the trailer here, but the host site won't allow it. Bear with me while I move to a host that will. Meanwhile, here's a link to the trailer at imdb.