Resurrection Walk

Resurrection Walk by Michael Connelly is the most recent of the Lincoln Lawyer series, the seventh novel which was published in 2023. Harry Bosch has retired from being a homicide investigator for the police department, but he has developed some form of cancer for which he was being treated with chemotherapy at UCLA, so he was sick from both his illness and the cure. He has gone to work on a part-time basis for his half-brother, Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer. However, after working for the entirely of his career on the prosecution side, Haller was a tried and true defense attorney who is hated by all cops and the prosecuting attorneys for getting people off. Haller’s license plate on one of his blue Lincoln’s is “I Walk’em.” Meanwhile, Harry has a conflict about working for any criminals, which was Haller’s specialty.

 

The book begins with the exciting end to the prison term for Jorge Ochoa who has been behind bars for 14 years for a crime he did not commit shooting a cop. Not only was Haller able to prove Ochoa was not guilty, but rather, that he was actually innocent of the crime he was accused of doing,. The Ochoas were celebrating, as were the entire Haller defense team. Jorge had been held at Corcoran State Prison, a place that was dedicated to housing lifers, and it was rare for anyone to get released. Usually death had been the only way out, whether than by old age or by murder.

 

Harry’s part-time work for Haller, in addition to being Haller’s driver, was supposed to be limited to looking through the stacks of mail from prisoners who wanted Haller to represent them, but of course, most of those people were really guilty. However, given his long life in prosecutorial cases, Harry had a gift for quickly going through such letters and files to determine if any of them deserved another look. He found one such case of Lucinda Sands who had been accused of shooting and killing her former husband who happened to be an LA cop. Lucinda, or Cindy, had already been in jail for six years. She claimed her innocence and that her former attorney had gotten her to plead guilty in order avoid a life sentence. Cindy wanted to get out of jail so she could be a mother to her 14-year-old son.

 

This was another good court room drama in which Haller bounced back and forth between thinking he had a path to victory for his client, then to seemingly impossible roadblocks by the legal system that would keep her in prison for the duration of her sentence. Connelly used his usual cast of characters and the story was also about the slowly building relationship of the half-brothers.