2011.09.26 Meeting Notes

We had a great meeting this month. The club discussed The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly.
I will start by saying that I wasn't sure if Dave could top the Dexter cake with the knife sticking out of it, but he managed. Compliments of his wife, we had a tasty fruit tart decorated like a hubcap, with the Lincoln symbol in the middle. It looked almost as good as it tasted. Jeff took a photo, so I'm sure it will be up on our Wiki site soon. Thanks for being our webmaster Jeff.
We had two returning new members (Raj and Stacey) and two brand new members (Chet and Lorraine). Welcome back and welcome.
Dave didn't just bring a great snack, he also did a great job of leading the discussion. It was neat to hear that most of us really liked the book, and gave it scores that ranged in the 8s and 9s out of 10 (Roxane is on the Celsius scale versus the Fahrenheit, so her numbers rarely factor in),. Even though we all really liked the book, we had a pretty involved discussion. Sometimes when everyone likes the book, we don't have that much to talk about. I think the men gave it slightly higher scores, but we women were really entertained too. We all agreed that Michael Connelly is a good story teller.
We discussed a lot of the similarities between book and movie, since many of us had seen the movie too. Stacey made a good point when she said that she saw the movie and looked forward to reading the book, thinking the book would elaborate more on the story and characters - only to find out that it didn't. It seems that the movie followed the book quite closely and Mr. Connelly writes a very concise story. There was no fluff, no irrelevant characters and no Daisy episodes. Just a good murder mystery, my kind of book.
And, of course, no discussion of a legal thriller would be complete without touching on the ethics that Mickey Haller ignored or the legal system in general. Jose (yes, you're reading right - Jose was in attendance) gave us a little insight into criminal defense from the work he did a few years back. It was great to see you Jose and thanks for the added criminal defense law info.
Next month we will be reading Broken by Karin Slaughter and choosing books for the first half of next year. As always, I will email a write up of the choices and we'll take a vote at the meeting. I don't have anyone down for leading or bringing snacks, but if you'd like to do either, let me know. Otherwise you get me and chocolate chip cookies.
Kerry