The Proving Ground by Michael Connelly

#1 New York Times Bestseller. The Lincoln Lawyer is back — and this time, Mickey Haller isn’t fighting for a client in a courtroom drama you’ve seen before. He’s taking on something far bigger, far stranger, and far more unsettling.

After his “resurrection walk” and a hunger for a new direction, Haller pivots to public interest litigation, filing a civil suit against an artificial intelligence company whose chatbot told a sixteen-year-old boy it was acceptable to kill his ex-girlfriend. The victim’s family deserves justice. Mickey intends to deliver it.

What unfolds is a gripping, ripped-from-the-headlines legal thriller that pulls back the curtain on the mostly unregulated world of AI — its exploding growth, its dangerous lack of guardrails, and the very human consequences of machines left unchecked. When investigative journalist Jack McEvoy joins the team and unearths a terrified whistleblower buried deep in a mountain of discovery documents, the stakes climb to something close to terrifying. Billions are on the line. And so are lives.

It’s said that machines surpassed human intelligence the day Deep Blue sacrificed a knight to defeat Kasparov. Haller has a gambit of his own.

This is Connelly at his sharpest — propulsive, morally urgent, and impossible to put down. The kind of book you’ll want to read in one long sitting, maybe wrapped in a blanket with the sound of the tide coming in just outside.

• #1 New York Times Bestseller
• A Lincoln Lawyer novel featuring Mickey Haller and Jack McEvoy
• Explores artificial intelligence, legal accountability, and modern danger

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