The Lincoln Lawyer was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2005, introducing Mickey Haller and launching Connelly’s second major series. The novel was adapted into a 2011 film starring Matthew McConaughey and a Netflix television series (2022–), extending Connelly’s reach beyond the crime fiction readership into mainstream popular culture.
Mickey Haller is a criminal defense attorney in Los Angeles who has no office — he operates from the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car, driven between courthouses, jails, and client meetings by a driver who is also his bailbondsman. His clients are the street-level criminals of LA: drug dealers, petty thieves, prostitutes. He is good at his job, ethically flexible but not corrupt, and entirely cynical about the justice system’s capacity for actual justice.
Then Louis Roulet walks in: wealthy, handsome, accused of assaulting a woman in her apartment. It’s the kind of case Haller usually doesn’t get — a paying client with money for a real defense. But as Haller investigates, he discovers connections between Roulet’s case and an old one — a case where Jesus Menendez, a former client Haller represented poorly, went to prison for murder. The evidence suggests Roulet may have committed the crime Menendez is serving time for.
The novel’s central conflict is legal ethics: attorney-client privilege prevents Haller from revealing what he knows about Roulet, but an innocent man is in prison. Connelly uses the dilemma to explore the gap between legal procedure and moral justice — a system designed to protect rights can also protect the guilty.
Collecting The Lincoln Lawyer
First edition (Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2005): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $60–$150
- Without jacket: $8–$15