When we met Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer, he was a defense attorney who would only take clients he believed innocent. At the close of 2011's The Fifth Witness, Mickey was throwing his hat in the ring for Los Angeles County District Attorney. We never see the actual election, but Mickey notes in passing as we begin Guilt the failure of his campaign and an incident stemming from a case that cost him deeply on a personal level.
And we also see him using flat-out dishonest trickery to help a guilty man go free, using any scheme to get the jury -- the "gods of guilt" of the title -- or the system to work to his advantage. His new case links to an old one, and his current client's actual innocence initially is less of a spur for him than is the desire to find out what happened to his former one. That changes as things progress, but Mickey's work for his client turns over some nasty rocks, which hide even more nasty things that aren't happy to be uncovered.
Connelly uses a kind of flippant, superficial tone in writing the Haller books, as opposed to the bleaker and more world-weary voice of his other series featuring LAPD detective -- and Mickey's half-brother -- Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch. It fits the different character, and helps ease the fact that as the book begins, our hero has become a guy who's kind of tough to like or to root for.
As the story moves, Mickey realizes he has to argue the case of his own actions before another set of "gods of guilt," in this case the guilt he feels for the mistakes he made and the consequences they bring about. Whether he succeeds in doing so in the courtroom or not, that greater judgment will continue to dog him until he finds ways to comes to terms with it.
-----
And so, too, does the latest volume in its chronicle, David Weber's Like a Mighty Army. It's the seventh in the "Safehold" series, which tells how human beings fled their doomed world to escape the genocidal Gbaba and established a low-tech colony on a planet they named Safehold. A dispute rose between those who wanted to lay low and quietly redevelop technology in order to come back and defeat the Gbaba and those who wanted to remain low-tech forever. The second group won, and for almost 900 years humanity has been under the thumb of the Church of God Awaiting, which that faction established to control Safehold's culture and restrict its technology.
But for the last seven years, the android duplicate of Nimue Alban, in the guise of the warrior-monk Merlin Athrawes, has fought against the church and brought several Safeholdian nations into alliance against it. Nimue's android body was an insurance policy the destroyed faction left in order to try to regroup and begun humanity's return to a technological society.
Weber stumbled pretty significantly in the series' fourth book, A Mighty Fortress, which read like a series of meeting minutes as he showed endless conversations about plans and very little of the actual execution of those plans and the action therefrom. No. 5, How Firm a Foundation, was a complete reversal, the best the series had been since its first volume, and No. 6, Midst Toil and Tribulation, not quite as good but still a great read.
Army, on the other hand, returns to the long hard slog that wrecked Fortress, only with endless digressions about the troop movements and numbers instead of councils and meetings (although those show up too). Readers can put up with those kinds of things, as well as Weber's habit of cliché-ifying himself -- here he adds his habit of noting that so-and-so was "tall for a citizen of such-and-such country," frequently parodied in spoofs of his Honor Harrington books. But the putting up depends on the story moving forward, and except for a couple of new and potentially interesting twists, it doesn't.
The Safehold universe offers an author the canvas for a sizable and intricate work -- even after Nimue/Merlin's allies defeat the Church they will still have to rebuild their world to be able to support spaceflight and then defeat the Gbaba. But at this point, it's almost like Weber has decided to paint each individual thread of that canvas, and although the hope he has many creative years left is reasonable -- he's only 61 -- there may be nobody around who cares to look at the finished work once it's done.
No comments:
Post a Comment