The Proving Ground by Michael Connelly, Book Review

Michael Connelly is one of my all-time most favorite authors. One of the few, whose books mostly got better over the years.

The Proving Ground is his latest creation, rated the absurdly high 4.5 on Goodreads. Unfortunately, although far more interesting than the last one, we’ve seen better it didn’t qualify for 4* on my shelves.

Mickey Haller is tired from criminal cases and moved to the area of civil law. He’s suing an AI company, whose AI-assistant convinced a teenager to commit murder. The settlement offers go up and down, and the ruthless billionaire behind the company will no spare additional efforts to end the case and hide everything behind a NDA.

The topic is deep and the plot is plausible, actually it could be something that has already happened. I have no objections in that area. The reason why the book didn’t click with me is that it was just uninteresting, and some was even meaningless. But while I have significant tolerance for inaccuracies, reaching page 250 or 300 without anything of substance happening was not good for me.

The plot offered many chances that could develop to be interesting. It had a secondary case. Harry Bosch and Renee Ballard got a shout out. But none of that had a meaningful follow-up, it was almost like it had to be included for the sake of being there, proving that the story is from the Harry Bosch universe. The billionaire wasn’t really a good match for the Lincoln Lawyer or some cat walked on the keyboard and we didn’t get far.

Overall, the book left me with a bad taste. I awarded it with an honest 3/5. Felt like it was written by the late John Grisham, whose stories are written to convince the reader that a certain causes are just. If you want to be convinced that AI is biased and can kill, look no further. The tagline could’ve been “garbage in, garbage out”.

10 thoughts on “The Proving Ground by Michael Connelly, Book Review

      1. On your dashboard where is says daily prompt, you click that and get a blank page ? try to open a blank page add a block + sign select writing and that should put the prompt for today in there. Did you install any plugin or change a them. Maybe log out and back in. WordPress has some strange behavior at times.

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      2. This is the WP Daily Writing Prompt. I clear my cache every week and nothing has changed. I will try Firefox to see what happens, Safari doesn’t play nice with many companies. WP does have more than some quirks. It’s not that big of a deal, I just like to participate. 🙂 Again, thank you.

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