Michael Connelly sure does know how to craft a novel.
Bosch has finally aged out, so there probably won’t will be any more Bosch books.
So it looks like Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, will be Connelly’s main dude going forward.
Mickey is still young-ish, but also aging (aren’t we all!).
He’s moved up the legal ladder from criminal law to civil law.
He doesnt even drive the Lincoln any more!
He’s still got it in the garage for special occasions, but day to day he drives a very practical and easier-to-park Bolt! 🙂
He’s still got his very large investigator, Cisco.
Cisco’s attractive wife Lorna is still his office manager.
This book
Mickey is suing a giant AI company (Tidalwaiv) on behalf of a woman who’s daughter was killed by a classmate/former boyfriend. The lawsuit says an AI bot named Wren told him to do it.
There are actually three parties to the suit at the start:
- Brenda – the single mom of the dead girl
- Trisha – the mom of the killer.
- The two moms have sort of bonded in their grief.
- Bruce Colton – the dad of the killer
- This guy is just a straight-up jerk.
- All through the book, he’s jerky every chance he gets.
“Aaron Colton killed my clients daughter because of AI chat bot went rogue.” p 22
p 34 Mickey and Cisco go to interview a disgruntled former employee, but he is dead! An apparent suicide.
p 13 A tech guy named McEvoy has offered to work on this case for his own investigative goals.
p 60 He’s already turned up a woman (Naomi Kitchens) who was hired to be an ethicist for the company but then she suddenly disappears from all emails and they hired a different ethicist! Naturally Mickey wants to know why!
p 65 She teaches at Stanford. Mickey and McEvoy fly up to interview her at her History of Machine Learning class. She’s scared.
Their flight home becomes a drive because there is a massive wildfire in the LA hills so all the flights are packed.
I think the fire itself will be a distraction, but (p 83) it has the effect of burning Maggie McFierce (current LA District Attorney and Mickey’s former wife Maggie McPherson) out of her house so that she goes to live with Mickey. …
Where they re-kindle the old flames! Yay!
Quick talk with Wren (the bot)
Mickey’s team have Arron Colton’s computer, the one from which he had his conversations with the AI bot.
The catch is that in order to talk to the bot they must be on-line. They’re afraid to do that because the company with their sophisticated tools will see what they’re upto and will trace them instantly.
p98 They work out a very complicated scheme to sign on to the laptop from inside the police station investigating the crime. Doesn’t go well. They get two questions in then are cut off.
Mickey makes an enticing little crack about calling the bot as a witness at trial! (p 101)
Challenger disaster
p 104 Turns out Naomi Kitchens was born on Jan 28, 1986, the very day of the Challenger disaster. I’d forgotten how gruesome it was, all seven families of the astronauts gathered to watch, and it exploded before their eyes. Yuck.
This has defined her life in a small way. Her birthday is a happy day for her, but the papers are full of “remembering Challenger” every darned year! 🙂
Now she’s thinking about the whistleblower who kept quiet, and decided to give Mickey’s crew the hard drive they want.
Another case pops up, which I’m not even gonna talk about until it affects the main plot. By the Chekhov’s gun principle, it will eventually, but until then… 🙂
Tidalwaiv ups their offer to walk away to $50 million!! That gets everyone’s attention.
Mickey would walk away with 10-12 mil he reckons! More money than he’s made in his whole life he notes to himself.
The dad of the murderer (Bruce) is all over it. He wanted to take the earlier offer for much less money, so he’s pretty intense about wanting to take this. But the mom of the victim is a hard NO, no amount if payment is enough. The murderers mom backs her up.
p 172 Bruce is such a major jerk, that Mickey says something uncharitable about no wonder the kid spent all his time with “an on-line fantasy”.
The trial starts
- p 196 Opening statement by Mickey.
- p 202 First witness. Detective Clark, who I thought was a cool guy.
- p207 Funny bit where Clark recognizes a quote from Romeo and Juliet because it was in a Blue Oyster Cult song from his high school days :))
- p 219,20,22,23,24 – all have bits of dialog between the boy and Wren, the AI bot.
- Naomi Kitchens is really impressive, her list of academic accomplishments makes me jealous!
- 245 College USF, Masters UC Berkeley, doctorate Stanford
- 246 worked as coder at Microsoft, Apple (I dunno about tht…)
- 247 She explains what an “ethicist” is
- Clair (the Software Project being sued) was already under development for three years old when they brought her in for “ethics” oversight!
- 248 We learn what a Large Language Model is.
- How machines acquire natural language.
- Also biases and inaccuracies
- 249 Naomi was VERY alarmed that Clair is designed to be a “thirteen-plus” project.
- that means it’s rated as suitable for 13 year olds.
- 250 But the large language model they trained it on was for grownups!
- 255 Next day we find that the coders on the project are all male, and a few of them seem to be in the “hates women” incel-ish category.
- Again, not evil per se, but not great for designers of a a female Bot for 13 year old boy.
- 251 Naomi had clashed with a particular coder who put personal stuff in.
Vacations to the sex alleys of Thailand was her example of not cool for 13 year olds.- Mickey of course wants to talk to this guy!
- 258 Trouble!
- Defense turns up that Naomi had a boyfriend at the company when she was at there!
- 261 Bruce is still an asshole.
- 271 Bruce and Trisha go fo the money! They drop out of the suit and settled for the big bucks.
- 287 Many pages with spent Dr Debbie, a child psychiatrist from Florida who is expert on children addicted to AI.
- 293 “Clear that Aaron was in love with Wren”
- 294 “Wren told him to delete her from his life”
- “303 Next witness Dr Spindler, a Caltech prof
- I liked him because he gave a nice history lesson in the Eliza program at MIT in the 60s-70s, back in MY day! 🙂
- 307 another history lesson on Isaac Asimov!
- 310 Now we’re doing wording details from incel internet buzzwords. I’ll skip unless it matters.
- A juror tests positive for COVID. They break for the weekend.
- 320 The billionaire behind the company shows up with a briefcase of cold, hard cash to bribe Haller to get his client to settle.
- There’s more drama with someone playing dirty tricks on Mickey, but it gets sorted, and on Monday he’s ready to call his final witness!
- 351 Final witness is the misogynist coder (Whittaker). He’s the kind of guy who would make his on-line name “wiseacre23”, as a play on Whittaker.
- He is hyper-reactive and unpleasant from the first question.
- 359 As the day moves on, Mickey finally maneuvers his testimony to where can read some damning Reddit posts and get him going on incel stuff.
- 363 Mickey calls him an incel, which stirs up the judge.
- 365 He makes a strong case that Whittaker was involved in a dark site that targeted women.
TidalWaiv folds. Mickey and his remaining client get $50 million!
Conelley is a very good expositor. I loved all that stuff about language models and history and Eliza such … could you tell?
Summary thoughts
Mickey was going to put the bot (Wren) on the stand but didn’t get to because the other side gave up.
There was NEVER a body! I was so sure someone would get murders along the way, but it didn’t happen?
I think Connelly had a little fun with this by having the very first witness the went to interview be dead from natural causes. That was the last dead person!