Harry Bosch Quotes

There is nothing you can do about the past except keep it there.

There is no client as scary as an innocent man." J. Michael Haller, Criminal Defense Attorney, Los Angeles, 1962.

You can't patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

What is important is not what you hear said, it's what you observe.

What is jealousy but a reflection of your own failures?

There were a billion lights out there on the horizon and I knew that all of them put together weren't enough to light the darkness in the hearts of some men.

I view people two ways. They're either eye-for-an-eye people or they are turn-the-cheek people.

He [Harry Bosch] defined good company not by the conversation but by the lack of it. When there was no need to talk to feel comfortable, that was the right company

I've learned over the years that sometimes if you ask the same question more than once you get different responses.

Los Angeles was the kind of place where everybody was from somewhere else and nobody really droppped anchor. It was a transient place. People drawn by the dream, people running from the nightmare. Twelve million people and all of them ready to make a break for it if necessary. Figuratively, literally, metaphorically -- any way you want to look at it -- everbody in L.A. keeps a bag packed. Just in case.

If the system turns away from the abuses inflicted on the guilty, then who can be next but the innocents?

You can fall in love and make love many times but there is only one bullet with your name etched on the side. And if you are lucky enough to be shot with that bullet then the wound never heals.

The setting sun burned the sky pink and orange in the same bright hues as surfers' bathing suits. It was beautiful deception, Bosch thought, as he drove north on the Hollywood Freeway to home. Sunsets did that here. Made you forget it was the smog that made their colors so brilliant, that behind every pretty picture there could be an ugly story.

Everybody matters or nobody matters.

You know you're going to get burned from time to time. It's just part of the game. So when it happens you have to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and forget about it because they're about to snap the ball again.

It’s lucky no one else knows what our most secret thoughts are. We’d all be seen for the cunning, self-aggrandizing fools we are.

Don't go growing a conscience on me," I said. "I've been down that road. It doesn't lead you to anything good.

In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is equalized with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that's in the long run. We must live in the short run and matters are often unjust there. The compensating for us of the universe makes all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.

She refused to accept the simple truism that the better you were, the bigger threat you were to those at the top....

I'm relaxed, Belk. I call it Zen and the art of not giving a shit.

Money. The ultimate motivation. The ultimate way of keeping score.

There is nothing like the start of a season, before all the one-run losses, pitching breakdowns and missed opportunities. Before reality sets in.

You're a sleazy defense lawyer with two ex-wifes and an eight-year-old daughter and we all love you.

The law was not about truth. It was about negotiation, amelioration, manipulation.

There is no end of things in the heart. ...she understood it to mean that if you took something to heart, really brought it inside those red velvet folds, then it would always be there for you. No matter what happened, it would be there waiting. She said this could mean a person, a place, a dream. A mission. Anything sacred. She told me that it is all connected in those secret folds. Always. It is all part of the same and will always be there, carrying the same beat as your heart.

Well, did he do it?" She always asked the irrelevant question. It didn't matter in terms of the strategy of the case whether the defendant "did it" or not. What mattered was the evidence against him -- the proof -- and if and how it could be neutralized. My job was to bury the proof, to color the proof a shade of gray. Gray was the color of reasonable doubt.

if you can’t stand the ghosts, get out of the haunted house.

The world was full of people who could not get over things. There was no closure and there was no peace. The truth did not set you free. But you could get through things. That’s what Bosch would tell him. You could head toward the light and climb and dig and fight your way out of the hole.

If you go into darkness, the darkness goes into you.

Whatever made her happy made me happy—except the time she thought divorcing me would make her life happier. That didn’t do much for me.

He had lived alone most of his life. He was used to places that were empty. He knew the real shelter of a home was inside yourself.

Bosch knew the dawn had nothing on the dusk. Dawn always came up ugly, as if the sun was clumsy and in a hurry. The dusk was smoother, the moon more graceful. Maybe it was because the moon was more patient. In life and nature, Bosch thought, darkness always waits.

It's only a wonderful world if you can make it that way. There are no street signs pointing to Paradise Road.

Loneliness had been the trash can fire he huddled around for most of his life.

Everybody counts or nobody counts.

No matter how much they tried to dress her up with neon and family entertainment she [Las Vegas] was still a whore.

Bosch had never liked Las Vegas, though he came often on cases. It shared a kinship with Los Angeles; both were places desperate people ran to. Often, when they ran from Los Angeles, they came here. It was the only place left.

You know what my father said about innocent clients? ... He said the scariest client a lawyer will ever have is an innocent client. Because if you fuck up and he goes to prison, it'll scar you for life ... He said there is no in-between with an innocent client. No negotiation, no plea bargain, no middle ground. There's only one verdict. You have to put an NG up on the scoreboard. There's no other verdict but not guilty." Levin nodded thoughtfully. "The bottom line was my old man was a damn good lawyer and he didn't like having innocent clients," I said. "I'm not sure I do, either.

There is a means to every end. A root to any cause. Sometimes the root is more evil than any cause, though it's the cause that is usually most vilified.

Eenie, meenie, minie, moe, catch a killer by the toe. If his lawyer’s Haller, let him go. Eenie, meenie, minie, moe. Hey bro.

There are plenty of people out there judging us every day of our lives and for every move we make. The gods of guilt are many.You don't need to add to them

There was still chicken on the bone but sometimes you just have to push the plate away.

Innocence is not a legal term. No one is ever found innocent in a court of law.

Everybody’s got a cage that keeps out the sharks. Those who open the door and venture out do so at their own risk.

Artists are supposed to stay hungry.” “That’s bullshit. That’s a myth invented to keep the artist down because art is powerful. You give an artist both money and power and they’re dangerous.

it’s like the laws of physics—for every action, there is an opposite and equal reaction. If you go into darkness, the darkness goes into you. You then have to decide what to do with it. How to keep yourself safe from it. How to keep it from hollowing you out.

Reasonable Doubt for a Reasonable Fee. Call the Lincoln Lawyer. Bosch

Everybody has a jury, the voices they carry inside.

The good ones all had that hollow space inside. The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness forever.

Nobody in this world is who they say they are. Nobody. Not when they’re in their own room with the door shut and locked. And nobody knows anybody, no matter what they think... The best you can hope for is to know yourself. And sometimes when you do, when you see your true self, you have to turn away.

He knew there were two kinds of truth in this world. The truth that was the unalterable bedrock of one’s life and mission. And the other, malleable truth of politicians, charlatans, corrupt lawyers, and their clients, bent and molded to serve whatever purpose was at hand.

why don’t you just Uber your ass out of here.

Out of the blue and into the black is what they called going into a tunnel. Each one was a black echo. Nothing but death in there. But, still, they went.

They need you until they don’t need you.

If we can’t be honest with ourselves, how can we ever tell the truth to the people out there?

Politicians could talk about building walls and changing laws to keep people out, but in the end they were just symbols. Neither would stop the tide any more than the rock jetties at the mouth of the port did. Nothing could stop the tide of hope and desire. Bosch

That's justice," she said, nodding at the statue. "She doesn't hear you. She doesn't see you. She can't feel you and won't speak to you. Justice, Detective Bosch, is just a concrete blonde.

Everybody has a jury, the voices they carry inside. Earl Briggs sits on my jury, Gloria Dayton, too. They are there with Katie and Sandy, my mother, my father, and soon Legal Siegel as well. Those I have loved and those I have hurt. Those who bless me and those who haunt me. My gods of guilt. Every day I carry on and I carry them close. Every day I step into the well before them and I argue my case.

I put my hand down below the table to check my zipper. You have to stand before a jury only once with your fly open and it will never happen again

It had been Bosch’s experience that when you looked back at a life, you used a magnifying glass. Everything was bigger, amplified.

But too much going with the flow is heading us into the sewer...

I felt sympathy for her but not too much. Idealism dies hard with everybody.

If you get into a game of talking to the media, you keep the story alive. Information is oxygen. Without it they die.

Swag?” “Scientific wild ass guess.

you can’t explain crazy.

Bosch had always thought it wasn’t a bad way to go—doing what you loved.

For every noble movement or advancement in the human endeavor across time, there were always betrayers who set everything a step back.

Working homicide for so many years, Bosch could not be surprised anymore by the horrors people inflicted on each other. But the horrors people saved for themselves were a different story.

from the short story, Cielo Azul “Harry, get an ambulance.” I stood up and stepped back from the scene. I felt my chest growing tight, a clarity of thought coming over me. In all my years I had spoken for the dead many times. I had avenged the dead. I was at home with the dead. But I had never so clearly had a part in pulling someone away from the outstretched hands of death. And in that moment I knew we had done just that. And I knew that whatever happened afterward and wherever my life took me, I would always have this moment, that it would be a light that could lead me out of the darkest of tunnels.

Livingstone had said sympathy was no substitute for action. That was an essential brick in Bosch’s wall. He had built himself as a man of action and, at the moment when the integrity of his life’s work had been called into question by a man on death row, he had chosen to turn his sympathy for Elizabeth Clayton into action.

The civilized people in the world, the ones who hide behind culture and art and politics… and even the law, they’re the ones to watch out for. They’ve got that perfect disguise goin’ for them, you know? But they’re the most vicious. They’re the most dangerous people on earth.

In the law of innocence, for every man not guilty of a crime, there is a man out there who is. And to prove true innocence, the guilty man must be found and exposed to the world.

Breathe it in. This is your moment. This is your stage. Want it. Own it. Take it.

Because it’s a hot door and we have to be careful. You never open a door on a burning room.

So, what it's like, Terry? Being a father." ... "It's like having a gun to your head all the time. Because I know if anything happens to her, anything, then my life is over.

Through studying the past we learn our future.

Shouldn’t death be the relief from the tortures of life?

We want the truth, Detective. You are confusing that with what we choose to tell the public.

You see, the past is what you make of it. You can use it to hurt yourself or others or you can use it to make yourself strong.

The black heart does not beat alone.

Darkness waits. All things come to the dark.

The pages were yellowed and had gone to brown at the edges. They were brittle, much like the memories the photos evoked.

All these years in the straight life and she still had a whore’s pride.

The rich kept you waiting so that you could feel free to admire all that they had.

He defined good company not by the conversation but by the lack of it. When there was no need to talk to feel comfortable, that was the right company.

Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

Trust no one. You may be working with the last honest cop in Mexicali, but why bet your life on it?

All his life Bosch had lived and worked in society’s institutions. But he hope he had escaped institutional thinking, that he made his own decisions.

You don’t like what you see out your window, you put up a wall.

Walls within walls, Bosch thought. He wondered what the owners did with all of their space besides fearfully guard it.

He knew evil could never be vanquished. It just moved from one place to another and waited.

I have always had the suspicion that officers assigned to front desk duty were chosen by cunning supervisors because of their skills in obfuscation and disinformation.

There was more silence and Bosch pictured his partner on the other end of the line in a $900 suit and a bankrupt frown.

the most likely place that elected politicians ran afoul of the law was in the area of money.

where there’s government subsidy, there is always corruption.

Mounted on the wall beneath the fish was a brass plate. It said: IF I’D KEPT MY MOUTH SHUT I WOULDN’T BE HERE

I'm going to have to go out there. She had a mother and a brother. See who's still around and can look at this thing." "Harry, you sure you--" "You think I have a choice?

When you find the one that you think fits, then grab on for dear life.

I once read a book about a reporter written by a reporter who described the life as always running in front of a thresher. I thought it was the most accurate description I’d read.

You build a city in the desert, water it with false hopes and false idols, and eventually this is what happens. The desert reclaims it, turns it arid, leaves it barren. Human tumbleweeds drift across its streets, predators hide in the rocks.

All his life Harry Bosch believed he had a mission. And to carry out that mission he needed to be bulletproof. He needed to build himself and his life so that he was invulnerable, so that nothing and no one could ever get to him. All of that changed on the day he was introduced to the daughter he didn’t know he had. In that moment he knew he was both saved and lost. He would be forever connected to the world in the way only a father knew. - "Nine Dragons" by Michael Connelly

There was polite laughter in the courtroom. Bosch noticed that the attorneys -- prosecution and defense -- dutifully joined in, a couple of them overdoing it. It had been his experience that while in open court a judge could not possibly tell a joke that the lawyers did not laugh at.

Bosch counted twenty-two names and it made him miss the old Los Angeles Times. In 1993 it was big and strong, its editions fat with ads and stories produced by a staff of some of the best and brightest journalists in their field. Now the paper looked like somebody who had been through chemo—thin, unsteady, and knowing the inevitable could only be held off for so long.

I’m a believer in the single-bullet theory. You can fall in love and make love many times but there is only one bullet with your name etched on the side. And if you are lucky enough to be shot with that bullet then the wound never heals.

Fulgoni gave me a look that I interpreted as a warning that I was crossing into a territory that he had deemed off-limits when we had last discussed his testimony. I gave him a look back that said too fucking bad. I have you under oath. I own you.

The alley was like most any other alley in a city where the infrastructure was crumbling, in a state where the infrastructure was crumbling. It was a patchwork of asphalt spot repairs and loose gravel over a crumbling base of decades-old concrete.

He's dead: Internal bleeding. When they opened him up they found a toothbrush shiv lodged in the anal cavity. It was never determinded whether he'd put it up there for safe keeping himself or somebody else did it for him, but it was a good lesson for the rest of the inmates. They even put up a sign. "Never put sharp objects up your ass.

It was a good strategy but this is where I intended to turn her plans upside-down. In the courtroom there are three things for the lawyer to always consider: the knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. Whether at the prosecution or defense table, it is the lawyer’s job to master the first two and always be prepared for the third.

The bag was a hybrid I had picked up at a store called Suitcase City while I was plotting my comeback. [...] It had a logo on it -- a mountain ridgeline with the words "Suitcase City" printed across it like the Hollywood sign. Above it, skylights swept the horizon, completing the dream image of desire and hope. I think that logo was the real reason I liked the bag. Because I knew Suitcase City wasn't a store. It was a place. It was Los Angeles.

What happens when you eat too much alphabet soup?” “What?” “You have a vowel movement.

He called them human tumbleweeds moving with the winds of fate.

I reminded myself of a simple truism—everybody lies

People are the worst animals,” Rider said. “They will do anything to each other. Just to indulge their fantasies.

And there’s this saying they have about conformist society: The nail that sticks out gets pounded down.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you….

People lie, the president lies, corporations lie and cheat.…The world is ugly and not many people are willing to stand up to it anymore.

Big evil. There was no doubt that the same callous malignancy moved through the blood of the shooter here.

Aronson was getting at the fine line between seeking the truth and seeking a verdict in your client’s favor. They weren’t always the same thing.

The chasm was merely one of the orifices of that pit of blackness that lies beneath us..

I really enjoy mysteries, well-written fiction novels, historical novels, and the occasional vampire, wolf, human triangle as long as it's real

Getting the quote right isn't what matters. It's remembering what it means.

It’s all a cesspool, man. Doesn’t matter if you’re on the bottom or the top. You’re still swimming in shit.

Writing does for me what you got in that glass does for you. If I can write about it, I can understand it. And I can put it in the ground. That’s all I want to do.

Guilt,” he said. “You have to get by it. Let the ghosts go or they’ll take you under and you’ll never be the lawyer you are supposed to be. You will never see the big picture.

Ten years might as well be a hundred if you are doing time for a crime you didn’t commit, he said.

It’s a left-brain right-brain thing. People are more agreeable toward people on their left.

When people think they have discovered or earned a certain knowledge on their own, they are more apt to hold on to it.

The rich kept you waiting so you could feel free to admire all that they had.

Time had eroded the bond between them. They were strangers who shared the same story.

Repeat offenders mean repeat customers and McGinley was both, as many of my clients tend to be.

didn’t think it was possible to be more than a mile from a Starbucks at any given point in the county, maybe even the world.

You can’t patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

She had said she was strong but he knew that comfort and strength could come from sadness. That was what she had.

Civil unrest occurs when the feelings of overwhelming powerlessness hit critical mass.

Are you like him?” she asked. “Who?” “Timido. Alone out there in the dark world.” “Sometimes. Everybody is sometimes.

You had to have an emotional response. It was that response that lit the match that started the fire of relentlessness.

They call him Stormy Monday, but he's kind of a dick every single day.

don’t worry, I’m not going to hold it against you when you end up wrong.

I didn’t have all the answers but experience told me that they would come.

I told him through the door that he could take his job and shove it up his ass. 'Course, a week later I had to ask him to pull it out of his ass and give it back to me.

parents see their children not only as they are but as they hope they will be in the future. Happy, fulfilled, not afraid.

In every murder is the tale of a city,” he said.

When you have more to look back at than forward to, you start thinking about the things you’ve done.

No matter what happens in the world, there will always be the need for heroes.

New Year’s Eve was a night for jazz, and the saxophone could cut you in half if you were alone.

Darkness waits. But it comes no matter what you do.

Not many places are named after bad guys,” she said. “How about Trump Tower?” Bosch responded.

one of the crazies moved into the cone of light beneath a streetlight. It was a black man, high-stepping and making jerking movements with his arms. He made a crisp turn and began moving back into the darkness. He was a trombone player in a matching band in a world somewhere else.

You can become unhinged and cut loose from the world. You can believe you are a permanent outsider. But the innocence of a child will bring you back and give you the shield of joy with which to protect yourself. I have learned this late in life but not too late. It’s never too late.

You see, the past is what you make of it. You can use it to hurt yourself or others or you can use it to make yourself strong. I’m strong, Harry. Now, tell me why you came to vist me today.

The art of sports writing always amazed me. Nine out of ten times the reader already knows the outcome of your story before reading it. They know who won, they probably even watched the game. But they read about it anyway and you have to find a way to write with an insight and angle that makes it seem fresh.

Slowly, his eyes came up and he looked through the kitchen window and out through the Cahuenga Pass. The lights of Hollywood glimmered in the cut, a mirror reflection of the stars of all galaxies everywhere. He thought about all that was bad out there. A city with more things wrong than right. A place where the earth could open up beneath you and suck you into the blackness. A city of lost light. His city. It was all of that and, still, always still, a place to begin again. His city. The city of the second chance. Bosch nodded and bent down. He closed his eyes, put his hands under the water and brought them up to his face. The water was cold and bracing, as he thought any baptism, the start of any second chance, should be.

He loved the city most at night. The night hid many of the sorrows. It silenced the city yet brought deep undercurrents to the surface. It was in this dark slipstream that he believed he moved most freely. Behind the cover of shadows. Like a rider in a limousine, he looked out but no one looked in. There was a random feel to the dark, the quirkiness of chance played out in the blue neon light. So many ways to live. And to die.

I knew the moment I decided to visit her the day before that I was buying myself another round of hope and hurt. But some people are fated this way, fated to play the same music over and over like a scratched record.

I have waited twenty years for this phone call . . . and all this time I thought it would go away. I knew I would always be sad for my sister. But I thought the other would go away.” “What is the other, Henrik?” Though he knew the answer. “Anger . . . I am still angry, Detective Bosch.” Bosch nodded. He looked down at his desk, at the photos of all the victims under the glass top. Cases and faces. His eyes moved from the photo of Anneke Jespersen to some of the others. The ones he had not yet spoken for. “So am I, Henrik,” he said. “So am I.” - "The Burning Room" by Michael Connelly

But nothing could ever beat the resurrection walk — when the manacles come off and the last metal doors slide open like the gates of heaven, and a man or woman declared innocent walks into the waiting arms of family, resurrected in life and the law.

It had been one of the biggest landgrabs in the city’s history and Bosch knew the story well, having tried all his life to counter his love of baseball and the Dodgers with the ugly story buried beneath the diamond where, as a boy, he watched Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale pitch. It seemed to him that every gleaming success in the city had a dark seam to it somewhere, usually just out of view.

But when Bosch opened the files as part of his cold-case review, he took a different approach. He had always operated according to the axiom that everybody counts in this world or nobody counts. This belief dictated that he must give each case and each victim his best effort.

There was something deeply affecting about that. Something unfair that went beyond the general unfairness of death at the hands of another. She wondered how men would live if they knew that in every moment of their lives, their size and nature made them vulnerable to the opposite sex.

The gravel road widened into a large turnaround where three similar looking and designed brothels sat waiting for customers. They were called Sheila's Front Porch, Tawny's High Five Ranch and Miss Delilah's House of Holies. "Nice," Rachel said as we surveyed the scene. "why are these places always named after women -- as if women actually own them?" "You got me. I guess Mister Dave's House of Holies wouldn't go over so well with the guys." Rachel smiled. "You're right. I guess it's a shrewd move. Name a place of female degradation and slavery after a female and it doesn't sound so bad, does it? It's packaging.

Hidden Highlands was maybe a little richer but not that different from many of the other small, wealthy and scared enclaves nestled in the hills and valleys around Los Angeles. Walls and gates, guardhouses and private security forces were the secret ingredients of the so-called melting pot of southern California.

Most criminal defendants talk their way into prison. Few talk their way out. The best single piece of advice I have ever given a client is to just keep your mouth shut. Talk to no one about your case, not even your own wife. You keep close counsel with yourself. You take the nickel and you live to fight another day.

That was my job. That was how it worked...very simple terms: The law was a large, rusting machine that sucked people up and lives and money. I was just a mechanic. I had become an expert at going into the machine and extracting what I needed from it in return... Much of society thought of me as a devil but they were wrong. I was a greasy angel.

... he always carried the feeling that he was struggling toward some kind of resolution and knowledge of purpose. That there was something good in him or about him. It was the waiting that was so hard. The waiting often left a hollow feeling in his soul. And he believed people could see this, that they knew when they looked at him that he was empty.

I mean like with the love of your life. Everybody’s got one person out there. One bullet. And if you’re lucky in life, you get to meet that person. And once you do, once you’re shot through the heart, then there’s nobody else. No matter what happens—death, divorce, infidelity, whatever—nobody else can ever come close. That’s the single-bullet theory.

Los Angeles: there was no rush hour because every hour was rush hour.

The only way to prove I didn’t do it is to prove who did,” I said. “That’s the law of innocence.

It was a stock answer and I noted that going beyond government requirements when there were no such requirements meant nothing.

Did you know that this year the Pentagon told all members of the military not to do DNA kits because of the security issues they pose?

King retired about five years ago and moved to East Bumfuck, Idaho—somewhere out in the woods with no phone and no internet. He went completely off the grid. She

Donovan stared at the car silently, contemplating it the way a matador looks at the bull he is going to fight.

Anybody who relished the idea of being a juror was blue ink all the way.

More inmates died of suicide than the needle on death row in California.

There was no going back to repair what had happened. You can’t patch a wounded soul with a Band-Aid.

paper bags, empty wine bottles, cotton balls, used syringes, newspaper bedding – the debris of the homeless and addicted.

That’s the problem here. It’s Sunday. Everybody wants to go home. Play golf. Sell houses. Watch the ballgame. Nobody cares one way or the other. Just going through the motions.

And I think that the public believes that the more guilty you are, the more lawyers you need.

That makes it a steep mountain to climb. You know what El Capitan is?” “At Yosemite? Yeah.” “Reversing a nolo is like climbing El Cap.

water-seeks-its-own-level

pride gets in the way of a lot of the right decisions

Sir, I can’t talk to you without a mask,” Moore said loudly. “Go get a mask.

It sometimes seemed to her as though the biggest barricades in the so-called justice system were on the inside, before you even got out the door.

twelve-hundred-dollar chairs and wore sleek designer shoes with tassels. Gone were the days of thick rubber soles and function over form,

Search warrants designate a specific window of time during which the search must take place. Afterward, police must in a timely manner file a document with the court called a search-warrant return that lists exactly what was seized. It is then the judge’s responsibility to review the seizure to make sure that the police acted within the parameters of the warrant.

In this country, there are two million people in prison. Two million. If the system gets it wrong one percent of the time, that is twenty thousand innocent people in jail. Lower it to half a percent and you're still at ten thousand people. This is what keeps me up at night. Why I always say, the scariest client is the innocent man. Because there is so much at stake.

Freeman was a damn good prosecutor but in my view she didn’t play fair. A trial was supposed to be a spirited contesting of facts and evidence. Both sides with equal footing in the law and the rules of the game. But using the rules to hide or withhold facts and evidence was the routine with Freeman. She liked a tiled game. She didn’t carry the light. She didn’t even see the light.

Your life and livelihood are on the line here, Louis. You get sent to prison and you're not going to make it. Don't worry about your mother. A mother will do what she has to do to protect her young.

I reached between the seats to the backseat, where her purse was on the floor. It was the size of a grocery bag and it weighed a ton. "What the hell do you have in this thing?" "Everything." I didn't ask for further explanation. I managed to pull the bag up to the front seat, open it, and find her iPad. I put the bag on the floor between my feet, lest I pull a muscle leveraging it into the back again.

There was something pitiful about a woman in jail. I had found that almost all of the time, their crimes could be traced back to men. Men who took advantage of them, abused them, deserted them, hurt them. This is not to say they were not responsible for their actions or that some of them did not deserve the punishments they received. There were predators among the female ranks that easily rivaled those among the males. But, even still, the women I saw in jail seemed so different from the men in the other tower. The men still lived by wiles and strength. The women had nothing left by the time they locked the door on them.

When it came to opening statements, I was from the Legal Siegel school of law. He always said, save your powder, meaning less is more; don’t reveal your case or its surprises until it’s time to present your evidence.

It was during my explanation to my young daughter that I finally realized why I had been drawn to this particular practice of law. Yes, some of my clients were just gaming the system. They were charlatans no better than the banks they were taking on. But some of mu clients were downtrodden and disadvantaged. They were true underdogs in society and I wanted to stand for them and keep them in their homes for as long as I possibly could.

The Strip was still lit by a million neon lights, though the crowds on the sidewalk had greatly decreased by this hour. Still, Bosch was awed by the spectacle of light. In every imaginable color and configuration, it was a megawatt funnel of enticement to greed that burned twenty-four hours a day. Bosch felt the same attraction that all the other grinders felt tug at them. Las Vegas was like one of the hookers on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Even happily married men at least glanced their way, if only for a second, just to get an idea what was out there, maybe give them something to think about. Las Vegas was like that. There was a visceral attraction here. The bold promise of money and sex. But the first was a broken promise, a mirage, and the second was fraught with danger, expense, physical and mental risk. It was where the real gambling took place in this town.

The law of innocence is unwritten. It will not be found in a leather-bound codebook. It will never be argued in a courtroom. It cannot be written into law by the elected. It is an abstract idea and yet it closely aligns with the hard laws of nature and science. In the law of physics, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In the law of innocence, for every man not guilty of a crime, there is a man out there who is. And to prove true innocence, the guilty man must be found and exposed to the world.

The citizens want their police to protect them, to keep the plague from their eyes, from their doors. But those same John Q.’s are the first to stare wide-eyed and point the finger of outrage when they see close up exactly what the job they’ve given the cops entails.

Murder was murder, and Ballard knew that every case deserved the full attention and effort of the police department. But Ballard was always struck by the murder of a woman. Most times the cases she reviewed and worked were exceedingly violent. Most times the killers were men. There was something deeply affecting about that. Something unfair that went beyond the general unfairness of death at the hands of another. She wondered how men would live if they knew that in every moment of their lives, their size and nature made them vulnerable to the opposite sex.

for men serving life without parole. You checked in but you never checked out. This was where Charlie Manson died of old age. But many inmates didn’t make it to old age. Homicides in the cells were common. Jorge Ochoa was just two steel doors down from an inmate who had been beheaded

It was the era of fake news and reporters being labeled by those in power as enemies of the people. Newspapers were folding right and left and some said the industry was in a death spiral. Meanwhile, there was a rise in biased and unchecked reporting and media sites, the line increasingly blurring between impartial and agenda-based journalism.

The harm is in lying to me, I said. You can lie to your mother, to Dobbs, and to your priest and to the police. But when I ask you something directly, do not lie to me. I need to operate from having facts from you. Incontrovertible facts. So when I ask you a question, tell me the truth. All the rest of the time you can say what you want and whatever makes you feel good.

I don’t remember what it stood for,” Ballard said. “I was on patrol in Pacific Division and I remember filling out the forms on the MDC. Geographic something or other.” “Geographic Reporting and Safety Program,” Bosch said. “The guys down in the ASS Office really worked some OT on it.” “Ass Office?” “The Acronym Selection Section. You never heard of it? They got about ten guys down there full-time.

A preliminary hearing is a routine step on the way to a trial. It is one hundred percent the prosecution's show. The state is charged with presenting its case to the court and the judge then rules on whether there is sufficient evidence to take it forward to a jury trial. This isn't the reasonable doubt threshold. Not even close. The judge only has to decide if a preponderance of evidence supports the charges. If so, then the next stop is a full-blown trial.