The Proving Ground

I’ve loved all of the books in Michael Connelly’s Lincoln Lawyer series. This latest one might well be my favourite. The shift to public interest litigation marks a fresh direction. Defence attorney Mickey Haller tackles a high-stakes civil lawsuit against a powerful AI company, making the narrative feel both timely and apt.

He represents the family of a murdered teenage girl, arguing that the tech company’s AI chatbot actively encouraged her sixteen-year-old ex-boyfriend to kill her. It offers a compelling tale of corporate obstruction, witness intimidation, and the unregulated world of generative AI that, though fiction, felt unsettlingly close to reality.