Michael Connelly is a well-known novelist renowned for his detective books; yet, with the publication of The Lincoln Lawyer series, he ventures into the realm of legal thrillers. Connelly gives us our first glimpse of the mysterious and cynical criminal defense lawyer Michael Haller in the volumes that comprise The Lincoln Lawyer series. Because of his propensity for doing business from the trunk of his Lincoln town car, he is also known by the nick appellation “the Lincoln Lawyer.”
The acclaimed Harry Bosch books written by Connelly take place in the same universe as these novels. In addition to this, Bosch is Mickey’s half-brother and makes cameos in the novels written on Mickey Haller (and vice versa). If you are interested in reading novels that are similar to the Lincoln Lawyer series, then the following books are some of the greatest options for you to consider.
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1. Speak of the Devil
The year 2006 saw the publication of a book titled “Speak of the Devil.” Richard Hawke tells a story filled with memorable characters who are living on the edge of their sanity in his first book, which has an excellent pace and is utterly unique. In this novel, the main character, Fritz, closes in on a most horrible and brutal truth.
The murderer retaliates by making matters personal, which forces Fritz to come to terms with his worst fear, which is that dreams may occasionally become a reality. It’s a literary thriller that keeps you guessing until the very end of the book. And the weather in New York City on Thanksgiving morning as described on this book is picture perfect.
2. The Fallen
This book by T. Jefferson was published in February 2006. You will find yourself unable to put The Fallen down, just as you couldn’t with the Lincoln Lawyer series. Robbie Brownlaw, a murder investigator, suffers from synesthesia after being in an accident.
Synesthesia is a neurological disorder in which a person’s senses get confused with one another. Sometimes, when other people are talking to him, he sees their voices as colorful forms that are generated by the emotions of the speakers rather than by the words themselves. After the body of a sergeant in the Professional Standards Unit is discovered, he will have to use all of his skills, both regular and paranormal, to figure out who committed the crime.
3. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
This is a non-fiction book, yet it is one of the best true crime reads around. It comes as a result of the investigation and prosecution of defendants accused of committing a quadruple murder in Kansas. During their trial, the defendants asserted temporary insanity as their defense. The story is articulate and novel, and since it is presented from three different points of view, it offers a fresh take on a particular moment in time.
4. The Pelican Brief
It is impossible to compile a required reading list for legal thrillers that does not include at least one book or more by John Grisham. The Pelican Brief is a classic, suspense-filled thriller written by the maestro of the courtroom drama genre. The plot revolves around the idea that having too much knowledge might be hazardous. John Grisham is the author of the legal suspense novel The Pelican Brief, which was released by Doubleday in the year 1992. This is his third book, after his previous works, “A Time to Kill” and “The Firm.”
5. Children Act by Ian McEwan
This book recounts the private and public difficulties of a judge through the dissolution of her marriage and as her personal life gets entwined with her judicial choices. The story is set inside the family court system as well as the case of a 17-year-old girl who rejects a blood transfusion on religious grounds. Overall, this book provides a captivating atmosphere, a shrewd main character, and some challenging ethical dilemmas to ponder.
6. The Good Daughter by Karin Slaughter
This novel may be more of a psychological thriller, but the main character is a woman who works as a lawyer, and it’s always a worthwhile decision to pick up one of Karin Slaughter’s books. The novel takes place in both the past and the present, and it follows a lawyer who is the first witness to a murder that took place 28 years ago. The setting is a tiny town. If you want to see more powerful women in the legal thriller genre, you should take advantage of every opportunity to read about them.
7. The Jury Master by Robert Dugoni
This book by Robert Dugoni is one of the best books similar to the Lincoln Lawyer series. The protagonist is a clever, hard-working, but lonely lawyer and the action takes place in the beautiful city of San Francisco. This novel is the prototypical example of the legal thriller genre since it both takes place in San Francisco and features one of the classic protagonists from legal thrillers.
If you’d like your legal thriller to include all of the conventional elements—from personal quests to political corruption, scary secrets, and lives in danger—then this is the book you should read if you want it to fulfill all of those expectations.
8. The Blackbox
Michael Connelly, an American author of crime fiction, has released his 25th book, titled The Black Box. This is the sixteenth novel in which the protagonist, Los Angeles Police Department investigator Harry Bosch, appears, “in part to mark the 20th anniversary of the character.” The book was released on November 26, 2012, and its publication date was chosen specifically for this reason.
During the riots in Los Angeles in 1992, Bosch investigates a cold case that has been open for the last 20 years. A dead white photographer is discovered next to the charred remains of a business. The first police officers to arrive on the site were identified as Harry Bosch and Jerry Edgar.
The Riots Task Force then took up the investigation, but it was never resolved despite their efforts over the years. When Harry makes the connection between a shell casing he found at the site and three previous homicides, the investigation is reopened, providing a thrilling setting for this book.
9. And Then There Were None
Agatha Christie, an English author, is known for penning the mystery thriller And Then There Were None. Christie has said that writing this book was the most challenging of all of her works. Ten Little Niggers was the title given to the book when it was originally released in the United Kingdom on November 6, 1939, by the Collins Crime Club.
The book is named after the children’s counting rhyme and minstrel song that plays a significant role in the story. But, it was later renamed for obvious reasons. The book has sold over one hundred million copies, making it one of the most successful mystery novels to have ever been published. The book is now ranked as the sixth best-selling publication in the country (any language, including reference works).
10. Tell No One
Harlan Coben, an American author, penned this book which was released in 2001 under the title Tell No One. This was Coben’s third stand-alone novel, and it was the first one he had written since 1991. Before that, all seven of his works had been installments in the Myron Bolitar series.
David and Elizabeth Beck, both of whom are 25 years old and have been married for a little over a year, are visiting a remote lake to commemorate the anniversary of the day they had their first kiss when Elizabeth is kidnapped and subsequently found dead. David is unable to move on from the horrible event, even though the murderer is identified and brought to justice.
Two long-dead corpses are discovered at the lake where the abduction took place on the 8th anniversary of Elizabeth’s passing. The lake is the same lake where Elizabeth was taken. In addition, David gets a disturbing email from an unknown source that reveals a term that should only be known by David and Elizabeth. It’s a page-turner, folks.
11. Mystic River
Mystic River is the title of a book that was written by Dennis Lehane and released in the year 2001. It was adapted into a film that was nominated for Academy Awards in 2003 and won one of those prestigious honors. The story follows the lives of three youngsters named Dave Boyle, Jimmy Marcus, and Sean Devine as they develop into young men in the city of Boston.
Dave is kidnapped by people who prey on children as he, Sean, and Jimmy are playing horsey on a street in their neighborhood at the beginning of the narrative. Dave manages to get away, but he feels emotionally broken when he gets back to his house a few days later.
The narrative then skips forward in time by twenty-five years: at this point, Sean is a murder detective, Jimmy is an ex-convict who now runs a convenience store, and Dave is a mere husk of a human being. The same night that Jimmy’s daughter went missing and was later discovered brutally killed in a municipal park, Dave came home to find his wife covered in blood when he arrived home from work. Sean is given the task of investigating the murder, and as a result, the three old friends find themselves entangled in one another’s lives once again.
12. From a Seed Comes a Tree
Betty Smith published her semi-autobiographical book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, in 1943 under the same name. The protagonist of the novel is a young woman and her family who are struggling financially but have high hopes for the future. They are residents of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in New York City during the first two decades of the 20th century.
The tenacious Tree of Heaven serves as the primary allegory in this piece of literature. The Tree of Heaven’s capacity to survive and thrive in urban environments serves as a metaphor for the protagonist’s unyielding pursuit of personal development.
13. Case Histories
Case Histories was published in 2004 and is a detective fiction written by British novelist Kate Atkinson. The story takes place in Cambridge, which is located in England. Jackson Brodie, a former police inspector who is now a private investigator, is shown here for the first time.
The story focuses on three family tragedies that seem to have no connection to one another at first glance: the disappearance of a little girl from a garden where she was playing; the murder of a husband by his wife using an ax; and the senseless killing of a lawyer’s daughter. Atkinson’s first book, Case Histories, is considered by many to be her seminal work; since then, she has written and published four more novels starring Brodie, namely: One Good Turn (2006), When Will There Be Good News? (2008), Started Early, Took My Dog (2010), and Big Sky (2012). (2019).
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14. The Poet
The Poet is the sixth book that Michael Connelly, an American novelist, has written. It was published in 1996 and is the first of Connelly’s books to not include Detective Harry Bosch. Instead, it is the first of his novels to feature Crime Reporter Jack McEvoy. In 2004, a follow-up book titled The Narrows was released. The Poet was the recipient of the Dilys Award in 1997.
The narrative is written in first-person, and it is recounted from the point of view of reporter Jack McEvoy. A mysterious character known as “Eidolon” is also given their first-person narrative at various points throughout the story. In addition, Connelly makes use of third-person narration even though he is narrating the tale from the perspective of the pedophile William Gladden. Additionally, this is the first appearance of Rachel Walling, an FBI agent who appears in many of Connelly’s books and who makes her debut in this one.
15. Poet Man
Memory Man is a crime thriller written by David Baldacci that follows the story of a man who discovers the bodies of his wife, daughter, and brother-in-law. This is the first book in which the character Amos Decker appears in a story. Grand Central Publishing first made the book available to the public in September 2015.
Former NFL player Amos Decker suffered permanent brain damage after taking a vicious blow on his debut play. With his football career over, Decker joins the police force and eventually becomes a very effective investigator by putting his newfound intelligence to use (synesthesia and hyperthymesia). Decker loses the desire to live after the unsolved death of his family, and he finds himself living on the streets while working as a private detective to support himself.
16. Nine Dragons
Nine Dragons is the fourteenth book in the Harry Bosch series and the twenty-second book overall (the twenty-first novel) written by Michael Connelly, an American novelist who specializes in writing crime fiction. On October 1, 2009, it was released in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and on October 13, 2009, it was released everywhere else.
The story takes place in many locations, including Hong Kong, where Bosch’s daughter Maddie and his ex-wife Eleanor Wish now reside. Maddie is taken hostage by a Chinese Triad (a criminal syndicate), which Bosch thinks is retaliation for his investigating a murder in Los Angeles in which his major suspect is a member of a triad.
The kidnapping of Maddie serves as the primary driving force behind the story. As a direct consequence of this, Bosch travels to Hong Kong in an attempt to get her back. Kowloon, which is Hong Kong’s most populous district, derives its name from the Chinese character for “nine dragons.”
17. The Winner
David Baldacci, an American novelist, is the creator of the fictional book “The Winner.” Grand Central Publishing was the first publisher to release the book, and they did so on January 1, 1998. In the book, LuAnn Tyler, an impoverished mother who lives in a trailer park, has a chance encounter with Jackson, a guy who is operating a large lottery fraud from inside the National Lottery. Together, they try to steal as much money as possible from the lottery.
She first declines his offer of a chance to win the lottery; but, when she is wrongly convicted of murder and forced to flee for her life with her small daughter in tow, she realizes that she has no choice but to accept his offer. He manipulates the lottery in such a way that she wins one hundred million dollars, but only on the condition that she emigrates from the United States and does not come back. When she unexpectedly comes back after 10 years, Jackson arrives to punish her for defying him, the FBI is looking for her in connection with the lottery scheme, and the only person who can assist her is the enigmatic Matthew Riggs.
18. Shutter Island
The American author Dennis Lehane is responsible for the book Shutter Island, which was released by Harper Collins in April of 2003. In February of 2010, a cinematic adaptation was made of this book starring Academy-award winner Leonardo DiCaprio. Lehane has said that he wanted to create a story that would pay tribute to the settings of Gothic novels, B movies, and pulp fiction. He compared the book to a cross between the writings of the Bronte sisters and the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” which was released in 1956.
He intended to place the main characters in a situation in which they did not have access to the resources of the 20th century, such as radio communications. He also organized the chapters in such a way that they were more tightly wound than in his last novel, Mystic River. The concept of the hospital and island that Lehane created was based on the hospital and grounds that are located on Long Island, which is located in Boston Harbor. When Lehane was a youngster, he had gone there during the Blizzard of 1978 with his uncle and the rest of his family.
19. The Children of Men
This is a dystopian book written in English by P. D. James and first published in 1992 under the title The Children of Men. The story takes place in England in 2021 and focuses on the consequences of widespread infertility. James paints a picture of the United Kingdom that is slowly losing its population and centers his narrative on a tiny number of resisters who do not share the pessimism of the general populace.
The book has been hailed as “wonderfully rich” and “a trenchant critique of politics and power that speaks forcefully” by many reviewers, including Caryn James of The New York Times, who wrote a review of the book for the paper. According to the distinguished scholar Alan Jacobs, “Of all of James’ works, The Children of Men is arguably the most acute in its social critique, definitely the deepest in its religious thought.”