Perhaps, over the past couple of weeks, you watched the movie version of The Lincoln Lawyer. And perhaps, as a result, you are thinking of reading the book. I can imagine such thinking taking place immediately after the purchase of a plane ticket.
To give you an idea of what you'll be up against, I've written my own The Lincoln Lawyer chapter to serve you as a book review of sorts. While I have chosen to parody the book, I do think the original will get you through a flight (and yes, that is a compliment):
SEVEN HUNDRED AND THIRTY-SIX
I picked Hayley up from school right after her lunch break. Maggie McFierce had called to tell me that Hayley had gone to the nurse's office with an upset stomach. Maggie had to be in court and I was happy to be there for Hayley, especially since she was sick. Every day across this vast over-priced Persian rug that is Los Angeles, 14,000 kids leave school early or never show up at all. Some are sick, some are faking, and some don't even bother to pretend - the latter are most likely to be my future clients. I pay close attention to which schools have the highest truancy rates and look for upswings in the data. Upswings mean future clients. I hoped Hayley would never become one.
The schools are like twig nests and if the student eggs in them aren't incubated properly by the adult bird teachers and administrators, then when those eggs hatch the young adult birds that come out of them don't migrate to jobs and success; they migrate to drugs and rape. A smart ornithologist studies these migration patterns. Because it is from the marrow of these birds that the legal vampire bat feeds, if he's the kind of bat that prefers marrow to just blood. And it's not always the twig nests in the parts of the forest you would expect that produce the most profitable wayward birds. Sometimes the eggs are put in yellow styrofoam containers with four sets of double wheels and taken to a twig nest outside the part of the Persian-rug forest they live in. I don't care where the egg is from, as long as the yolk is green.
Raul Levin has some contacts in the LAUSD from a year he spent undercover as a lunch lady. He gets me the latest truancy statistics and busing plans as a favor for the business I throw at him. I study them like...click here to read more...