A Fifth for the Fourth

For his fourth Mickey Haller novel, Michael Connelly brings us The Fifth Witness. We first met Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer, so-called because he had no permanent office and worked from the back seat of his Lincoln. Matthew McConaughey played Haller in a movie version of that book earlier this year, a fact that helps Connelly write a nice little joke at one point of Fifth Witness.

The Haller books are much lighter in tone than Connelly's Harry Bosch stories, as Haller seems much less damaged by life than his police investigator half-brother. Fifth Witness is no exception, even though the matter in the middle is as serious as any other -- a mortgage banker has been murdered. The accused, Lisa Trammel, was already Mickey's client because the bank the man worked at was foreclosing her house and he had been taking on foreclosure work in light of the drying up of criminal practice. Lisa maintains her innocence, which earlier on in the series would have been a must for Mickey, as he refused to represent someone unless he believed the person was innocent. These days, he's not so idealistic.

But innocent or not, she's a significant pain as a client, believing her statement of innocence is the same as innocence and continually getting in the way of Mickey's efforts to represent her in the trial and in possible media exploitation of the case. He also has to deal with a tough prosecutor with her eyes on the prize of the district attorney's office sometime in her future and get a lot closer to some shadowy connections to organized crime than may be good for him.

As always, Connelly's writing flows smoothly over the pages, carrying the reader along in the current of the story pretty much effortlessly. His explanations of how he puts on his case and why he does what he does in the courtroom ring true and their wry nature offers interesting flavor to the story.

Some expository dialogue about the mortgage foreclosure crisis makes for a few eddies in the current but they don't slow things down too much and are never so long you lose the story when you skip them. Mickey takes on some definition as a character as he tries to find a way to deal with the not-as-over-as-he-thought-it-was relationship with Maggie McPherson, his first ex-wife and mother of his daughter.

Fifth Witness doesn't carry as much immediacy as the earlier Mickey Haller books, almost as if Connelly is using it to set something else up in a later volume. But it is still well-ahead of a huge percentage of its companions on the bookshelves and can be enjoyed for the beach read it is.