Book Details
| Title: | The Proving Ground | |
| Author: | Michael Connelly | |
| Times Read: | 1 | |
| Last Read: | 11.04.25 |
Other Books Read By This Author (41)
- 9 Dragons
- Angels Flight
- The Black Box
- The Black Echo
- The Black Ice
- Blood Work
- The Brass Verdict
- The Burning Room
- Chasing the Dime
- City of Bones
- The Closers
- The Concrete Blonde
- Crime Beat
- The Crossing
- The Dark Hours
- Dark Sacred Night
- A Darkness More Than Night
- Desert Star
- The Drop
- Echo Park
- Fair Warning
- The Fifth Witness
- The Gods of Guilt
- The Last Coyote
- The Late Show
- The Law of Innocence
- The Lincoln Lawyer
- Lost Light
- The Narrows
- The Night Fire
- Nightshade
- The Overlook
- The Poet
- Resurrection Walk
- The Reversal
- The Scarecrow
- Trunk Music
- Two Kinds of Truth
- Void Moon
- The Waiting
- The Wrong Side of Goodbye
| Date Read | Note |
| 11.04.25 | Two Connelly books in one year! This is another Mickey Haller book, although he proclaims that he is no longer the "lincoln lawyer" since he's hung up criminal defense and moved over to civil. I guess if there's a thing that makes this book stand out it's the switch from a criminal defense to civil. The civil case in question is against an AI company, with Haller bringing suit against a chatbot for encouraging a teenager to kill someone then kill himself. Jack McEvoy also makes another appearance although he doesn't do much other than help Haller gather intel. I got the feeling that the topical AI component to the story rung bells with Connelly that it usually fell to his reporter character to conduit that, but this time with it being based on a real court case he had to tell it through Haller. In any case it didn't feel like a 50/50 book like those Bosch/Haller entries. More like a cameo. Um, the book itself was decent. I think it was kind of a middle of the road entry for Haller and Connelly. There were a few unfortunate tells about it that deflated it a little, like when I'm 90% through the book and the defense hasn't started their side of the case, I figure something will happen to make Haller win immediately. And the usual stuff like I don't think Connelly would write a book where Haller lost the case so any threat of mistrial or whatever felt hollow since I knew I was three quarters of the way through. Maybe if it was halfway through there'd be pagecount for a mistrial but not at three quarters. That seems kind of like cheating in some way but I don't know how to ignore that stuff. I will say, I thought the explanations of large language models to be passable, at least to my understanding. I don't think it was quite as elegant as Crichton would've done but nowhere near embarrassing which I think a lot of writers would put out. The topical nature of this book seemed like Connelly could've been chasing trends but at least he understood it enough to build a passable story around it. I do think in the end it does still feel somewhat gimmicky? A few details of the case kind of just pass by. I guess there's a balance there of having everything work out perfectly with zero loose ends and making it feel real where stuff like that never happens. The second case is also greatly minimized here but in the end I think I know why it's there which makes sense to me. Certainly the pages flew by. The last half of the book was a joy to read and a welcome break from RPG rules which I've been going over. I suppose it's a luxurious problem to have two Connelly books this year and have both of them be middle of the road. |
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