Michael Connelly: The Proving Ground (UK 2026)

From the Publisher:
Mickey Haller - The Lincoln Lawyer - leaves criminal court behind for his first civil lawsuit. But to him, this is still a murder trial.

An AI company's chatbot encouraged a sixteen-year-old boy to kill his ex-girlfriend. Can Haller prove the company knew the dangers of its own creation?

To do so, he turns to Jack McEvoy - a journalist who knows how powerful the coming wave will be - and together they soon uncover a whistleblower in hiding.

As the tech titans try to buy or bully their way out, the scale of their courtroom battle before them becomes clear. Because billions are at stake - along with countless lives - in an all or nothing case, which could change everything...

From the author of the books behind the #1 Netflix show The Lincoln Lawyer, and #1 Amazon Prime series Bosch and Ballard.

Michael Connelly: The Proving Ground. A Lincoln Lawyer Novel. Orion Books, ISBN: 9781398719088 (April, 2026), 320 p., £10.99.

Michael Connelly: The Proving Ground (UK 2025)

From the Publisher:
Mickey Haller - The Lincoln Lawyer - leaves criminal court behind for his first civil lawsuit. But to him, this is still a murder trial.

An AI company's chatbot encouraged a sixteen-year-old boy to kill his ex-girlfriend. Can Haller prove the company knew the dangers of its own creation?

To do so, he turns to Jack McEvoy - a journalist who knows how powerful the coming wave will be - and together they soon uncover a whistleblower in hiding.

As the tech titans try to buy or bully their way out, the scale of their courtroom battle before them becomes clear. Because billions are at stake - along with countless lives - in an all or nothing case, which could change everything...

From the author of the books behind the #1 Netflix show The Lincoln Lawyer, and #1 Amazon Prime series Bosch and Ballard.

Michael Connelly: The Proving Ground. A Lincoln Lawyer Novel. Orion Books, ISBN: 9781398719064 (October, 2025), 320 p., £22.00, eBook £11.99.

Michael Connelly: The Proving Ground (USA 2025)

From the Publisher:
From #1 New York Times bestselling author Michael Connelly, the Lincoln Lawyer is back with a case against an AI company whose product may have been responsible for the murder of a young girl.

Following his "resurrection walk" and need for a new direction, Mickey Haller turns to public interest litigation, filing a civil lawsuit against an artificial intelligence company whose chatbot told a sixteen-year-old boy that it was okay for him to kill his ex-girlfriend for her disloyalty.

Representing the victim's family, Mickey's case explores the mostly unregulated and exploding AI business and the lack of training guardrails. Along the way he joins up with a journalist named Jack McEvoy, who wants to be a fly on the wall during the trial in order to write a book about it. But Mickey puts him to work going through the mountain of printed discovery materials in the case. McEvoy's digging ultimate delivers the key witness, a whistleblower who has been too afraid to speak up. The case is fraught with danger because billions are at stake.

It is said that machines became smarter than humans on the day in 1997 that IBM's Deep Blue defeated chess master Garry Kasparov with a gambit called "the knight's sacrifice." Haller will take a similar gambit in court to defeat the mega forces of the AI industry lined up against him and his clients.

Michael Connelly: The Proving Ground. A Lincoln Lawyer Novel. Little, Brown, & Co., ISBN: 9780316563826 (October, 2025), 400 p., $30.00, eBook $15.99.