Michael Connelly’s “The Lincoln Lawyer,” Season 4, started on Netflix last Thursday, with the defense attorney, famous for his vanity license plate, IWALKEM, himself behind bars, accused of murder. The first episode is “7211956,” which is Mickey Haller’s booking number, and his college-age daughter Haley is upset on a visit when she hears it screamed by prison staff as his ID in the clink.
The novelist Connelly is executive producer, as he is with “Bosch,” which is on Amazon Prime, and its spinoffs “Bosch: Legacy” and “Ballard.” As he told the Irish Echo some years ago, he was not happy with early Hollywood treatments of his novels and insisted on creative control before he allowed for new adaptations of such characters as former Detective Harry Bosch and his fraternal half-brother Haller, who is played by Manuel García-Rulfo in the entertaining Los Angeles-set “The Lincoln Lawyer.”
Neve Campbell plays Haller’s ex-wife, a prosecutor, Dublin-born actor Jason O’Mara is her new love interest and Hollywood legend Elliott Gould returns as the defense attorney’s mentor.
Connelly was born the second of six children in a Philadelphia family that moved eventually to Florida. Both his Irish-American parents encouraged his journalistic and creative writing ambitions (his books are popular, too, in Ireland, where his eight great-grandparents were born).
Meanwhile, the novelist is not listed for this season as a co-writer on any episodes, as he has been in a couple of previous seasons, but the title of the first episode is an homage of sorts, it being his date of birth.
