Bestseller Connelly's paint-by-numbers seventh legal thriller featuring Mickey Haller (after 2020's The Law of Innocence) again teams the L.A. defense attorney with his half-brother, ex-LAPD officer Harry Bosch, who holds down his own Connelly series. After freeing a man wrongly convicted of murder with Bosch's help, Haller has launched a pro bono "in-house innocence project" to investigate questionable convictions, with Bosch vetting potential clients. Bosch recommends Haller look into the case of Lucinda Sanz, who pled no contest to manslaughter five years earlier for fatally shooting her ex-husband Roberto, an L.A. County sheriff's deputy. Sanz now claims she was innocent and entered the plea to avoid the risk of a life sentence after a trial. As the case never went to a jury, the records are sparse, but the investigative partners find enough question marks--including a key witness who admits that his statements were coerced--to pursue a federal claim that Sanz has been unlawfully imprisoned. Meanwhile, the powers that be, including some shadowy figures in the LAPD, will do everything they can to keep the case closed. Connelly is on autopilot here: the courtroom theatrics are bog standard, and much of the dialogue lands with a thud. This disappoints. Agent: Heather Rizzo, Rizzo Literary. (Nov.)

Nothing is more soul satisfying for defense attorney Mickey Haller than to be inside a prison when one of his clients does the "Resurrection Walk"; it begins with the prison guards taking off Mickey's client's manacles and ends with the client walking out to waiting family and friends. In this, the seventh in the Lincoln Lawyer series--Mickey is called this because he conducts most of his business from the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car--Mickey teams up once again with retired LAPD detective Harry Bosch, the star of his own separate series, in a stunning combination of police and legal procedural. After observing a satisfying resurrection walk, the Lincoln Lawyer decides to chase that great feeling by pursuing another case of wrongful imprisonment. Harry searches LAPD cold case files and finds a woman incarcerated for killing her husband, a former sheriff's deputy. The Haller-Bosch team's meticulous digging uncovers a hidden system of abuse and intimidation practiced by deputies working within prisons. As always, Connelly, who won the Edgar Grand Master Award in 2023, makes the tedious work of investigation fascinating as he shuttles between Mickey's and Harry's hard-bitten points of view.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The success of the Bosch and The Lincoln Lawyer TV series should propel readers to this latest Connelly novel.

Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer team up to exonerate a woman who's already served five years for killing her ex-husband. The evidence against Lucinda Sanz was so overwhelming that she followed the advice of Frank Silver, the B-grade attorney who'd elbowed his way onto her defense, and pleaded no contest to manslaughter to avoid a life sentence for shooting Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Roberto Sanz in the back as he stalked out of her yard after their latest argument. But now that her son, Eric, is 13, old enough to get recruited by local gangs, she wants to be out of stir and at his side. So she writes to Mickey Haller, who asks his half-brother for help. After all his years working for the LAPD, Bosch is adamant about not working for a criminal defendant, even though Haller's already taken him on as an associate so that he can get access to private health insurance and a UCLA medical trial for an experimental cancer treatment. But the habeas corpus hearing Haller's aiming for isn't, strictly speaking, a criminal defense proceeding, and even a cursory examination of the forensic evidence raises Bosch's hackles. Bolstered by Bosch's discoveries and a state-of-the-art digital reconstruction of the shooting, Haller heads to court to face Assistant Attorney General Hayden Morris, who has a few tricks up his own sleeve. The endlessly resourceful courtroom back-and-forth is furious in its intensity, although Haller eventually upstages Bosch, Morris, and everyone else in sight. What really stands out here, however, is that Connelly never lets you forget, from his title onward, the life-or-death issues behind every move in the game. The most richly accomplished of the brothers' pairings to date--and given Connelly's high standards, that's saying a lot. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.