As I have written about ad nauseum, I am not the world’s biggest fan of legal procedurals. Indeed, my very first column for Above the Law explained my dislike for Law & Order, arguably the most prominent legal procedural of all time. My typical criticism of procedurals is that their plots are too tidy and they eschew character development. Michael Connelly’s 2015 novel The Crossing — a hybrid between a legal procedural and a crime procedural — does exactly that; it succeeds as a procedural but fails in virtually every other respect.
The Crossing teams up two of Connelly’s most well-known characters, detective Harry Bosch and attorney Mickey Haller. Bosch, the extremely intelligent but authority-challenging LAPD detective, is Connelly’s most popular character, appearing in eighteen novels. Haller, Bosch’s half-brother, is a prominent Los Angeles defense attorney who works out of his car. Haller, who has appeared in five Connelly novels, is best known for being the protagonist of the film (and the eponymous novel) The Lincoln Lawyer, in which he was played by a pre-McConaissance Matthew McConaughey (in an amusing meta joke in The Crossing, it is revealed that a movie has been made about Haller’s life, with McConaughey in the lead role).
In The Crossing, Bosch, retired from the LAPD, is hired by Haller to help the defense of Haller’s client Da’Quan Foster, a reformed gang member accused of brutally raping and murdering Lexi Parks, an assistant city manager. Foster had no connection to Parks, and was only arrested because his DNA was found at the murder scene. Haller believes that Foster is innocent and was framed by the police. However, without any concrete exculpatory evidence, Haller is worried that Foster is going to go to jail for a crime he did not commit. After Haller’s original investigator Cisco is injured in a suspicious motorcycle accident, Haller asks Bosch to look through Foster’s police file to see if he can find an angle that the police missed. Bosch is initially reluctant, equating a former officer doing defense work to being a “Jane Fonda, as in hanging with the North Vietnamese.” Nevertheless, Bosch becomes more invested in the case when he realizes that the original officers may have missed some key pieces of evidence. His investigation soon reveals that Parks might have been involved in a complex conspiracy involving corrupt vice cops.
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Even though I have repeatedly maintained my aversion to procedurals, the book excels from a process point of view. Connelly describes Bosch’s investigation in painstaking detail, as he methodically reviews the police file, sees the clues that the cops previously missed, and follows up on those clues. Similarly, despite the fact that he is not a lawyer, Connelly does a great job portraying Haller’s brilliant oral arguments and cross-examinations, even throwing in legal doctrine like Terry stops. The book is worth reading for those reasons alone.
However, I was not as enamored with the plot itself. Given that Bosch repeatedly describes to Haller his reluctance to turn his back on his former colleagues and become a private investigator for a defense attorney, it was surprising and unbelievable that he would actually do just that. Connelly barely even attempts to provide a justification for why Bosch would do something he abhors. Connelly could have had Haller force Bosch to get to know Foster, which would make the defense feel more real. Instead, Bosch’s decision seems arbitrary.
The story also suffers because its antagonists — the two corrupt vice cops — are complete cartoons. They have little nuance or motivation for their crimes besides abject greed, and they have no qualms about murdering anyone who gets in their way. Characters that are just pure evil — without any shades of grey — are rarely effective (of course there are exceptions to this; Darth Vader is a much more effective character when he is abjectly evil than when he is whining about his dislike of sand). Moreover, because Connelly reveals the identities of the antagonists in the opening scene, there is little mystery or suspense.
Finally, some of Connelly’s humor does not land. Connelly takes great pleasure in making jokes about how much of a technological neophyte Bosch is. For example, in one scene, someone tries to explain the concept of Uber to Bosch, and it turns out that Bosch does not even know how to use his cell phone speakerphone. These jokes felt hacky and stereotypical.
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The Crossing is a perfectly fine novel for fans of procedurals. Just do not expect anything groundbreaking, well, except that perhaps for the first time I was actually wishing for more procedural elements.
Harry Graff is a litigation associate at a firm, but he spends days wishing that he was writing about film, television, literature, and pop culture instead of writing briefs. If there is a law-related movie, television show, book, or any other form of media that you would like Harry Graff to discuss, he can be reached at [email protected]. Be sure to follow Harry Graff on Twitter at @harrygraff19.