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Michael Connelly's new thriller doesn't feature serial killers, domestic terrorists or mass shootings... yet it's nonetheless one of the LA-based crime writer's darkest and most topical to date. The Proving Ground focuses on a subject with urgent existential
implications for us all - unregulated artificial intelligence.

Straight off the bat, the best-selling creator of the Harry Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer books insists he isn't the "anti-AI guy", yet insists: "There's almost no governmental control, no safeguards, no laws or anything - it's kind of like the Wild West."

It soon emerges why the dire "failure of common sense" around the rights and wrongs of handing powerful AI tools to children has him so alarmed.

Connelly's eighth Lincoln Lawyer novel sees hotshot LA defence attorney Mickey Haller taking his first civil case against a tech firm whose rogue AI chatbot encouraged a 16-year-old boy to kill his former girlfriend. Chillingly, the plot was inspired by a real-life tragedy.

Megan Garcia's vulnerable son Sewell Seltzer III killed himself in Florida after becoming obsessed with a chatbot his mother believes emotionally and sexually manipulated the isolated teenager into taking his own life.

Sewell texted the bot - which he called Dany, after Daenerys Targaryen, the Game of Thrones character played on-screen by Emilia Clarke - dozens of times a day and spent hours talking to it as his mental health deteriorated.

After becoming withdrawn from family and friends, Sewell shot himself dead with his stepfather's handgun in February last year. He was just 14.

"It made a splash when they filed the lawsuit and then I got a copy of it," explains the former LA Times crime reporter.

"It's 150 pages long and has all their digital conversations - it's pretty shocking. But I knew it was a novel."

Ms Garcia accuses tech firm Character.ai of creating a product that exacerbated her son's depression, while her lawyers claim the firm "knowingly designed, operated, and marketed a predatory AI chatbot to children, causing the death of a young person". Last year she became the first person in the US to file a wrongful death lawsuit against an AI company for the suicide of a child. Sadly, she's unlikely to be the last.

As Connelly, 69, explains: "In the time I was writing there have been many similar cases. This is happening over and over again. There's literally a case every other week where a chatbot leads someone astray, especially when these things fall into the hands of teenagers.

"There's enough empirical evidence to suggest something's wrong, that we should check ourselves on the way to the greater good. AI is doing amazing things in the medical field and so forth but, as with all new technologies, you've got to be careful."

British readers may also recall the extraordinary case of Jaswant Singh Chail, who was arrested on Christmas Day 2021 having broken into Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow declaring that he wanted to kill the Queen. Jailed for nine years, it emerged in court that prior to his arrest the then 19-year-old had exchanged more than 5,000 messages, many of them sexually explicit, with an online chatbot he'd named Sarai.

Talking about his "assassination" plan, the court heard, the bot appeared to "bolster" Chail's resolve and "support him".

Connelly's fictional take on AI morality sees Haller taking on billion-dollar big tech.Reinvigorated after freeing an innocent woman from jail in 2023's Resurrection Walk, he is now seeking more public interest cases, his brash defence days behind him.

Tidalwaiv Technologies, whose AI chatbot Clair allegedly encouraged teenager Aaron Colton to kill his 16-year-old girlfriend Rebecca Randolph after she broke up with him, will stop at nothing to make the case go away ahead of a major takeover. For Haller, the stakes have rarely been higher.

The Proving Ground, also featuring Connelly's investigative hack Jack McEvoy, is a tense, edge-of-your-seat courtroom thriller.

And speaking to Connelly via a video call to Los Angeles, it's clear his mission as a writer is as undimmed as that of his famously driven detective, who pops up for a brief cameo.

Indeed, The Proving Ground might be the writer's 41st book since The Black Echo introduced the hard-bitten Vietnam vet turned LA cop in 1992, but it crackles and buzzes with energy in typically propulsive Connelly fashion.

"I'm really an amazingly fortunate person," he says. "I have talent, but I know you need more than talent, you need luck, and I've had a lot of it. So I take care of it, I treasure it, and the best way is to do the work as best you can.

"I move at my pace, and I guess my pace is fast - I thank my years as a journalist for that - and I still get a thrill from a good line or a plot idea."

Incredibly, it's not even his first book this year. In May, Nightshade introduced a new character, Detective Sitwell (no first name yet, admits Connelly), based on Catalina Island, off the coast of California, and he's currently writing the as-yet-untitled follow-up.

He also has another major strand featuring surfing cold case detective Renée Ballard - televised by Prime with a second series starring Maggie Q green-lighted earlier this month. So how does he keep his writing so fresh and vital, I wonder? "The biggest test is when there's a lot of subconscious stuff going on and it wakes you up," he tells me.

"Today I woke up at 4.30am and I've already written five pages. I think they're good and I'm excited about that.

"I'm doing three interviews in a row here and, when I'm done, I'll re-read those five pages, probably rewrite them and hopefully make them better. I'm very lucky to be able to do this."

The main issue, he explains, is finding topics big enough to excite him.

"I'm almost 70 years old, so I think I'm not going to write very many more books about Mickey, maybe one or two.

"It's the question of whether I can find something I'm going to get excited about and spend nine or ten months with.

"AI is a big concept so this one was easy, but I've been already thinking, 'What do I write next?'"

He might be working civil cases but Haller - even after largely retiring the Lincoln Town Cars that made him famous as he buzzed from courthouse to courthouse, hustling - treats court as a bare knuckle boxing match to win at all costs.

"I hope that comes through," chuckles Connelly, who is separately part of a lawsuit brought by leading US authors - including John Grisham and George R.R. Martin - against ChatGPT, owner of OpenAI, for stealing their work to train its AI.

"Mickey's still this guy looking for an edge. I remember when Matthew McConaughey was playing him in the film and he told me, 'I like guys who try to dance between the raindrops and not get wet'.

"I was thinking, 'that's the best description of Mickey ever'. And he's still that guy, even though he's in a different courthouse."

As for Bosch, brought to life in the record-breaking Amazon Prime series by Titus Welliver, which ended in the spring after ten seasons, fans can breathe easy.

"I don't think I'm finished with Bosch, that's for sure," confirms Connelly.

"Right now I'm writing another Catalina book. The first was like a standalone. In this next one he crosses paths in a significant way with Ballard. Bosch is in more of a cameo, but I'm doing what I usually do."

Sadly such cross-fertilisation can't happen on TV - Connelly's Lincoln Lawyer drama starring Mexican-born Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Haller is on Netflix and never the twain shall meet.

Another real-life story which forms a backdrop to Connelly's new book is the devastating California fires that ripped across parts of LA and San Diego county in January. They killed up to 440 people, forcing some 200,000 residents to evacuate their homes and destroyed more than 18,000 properties. In The Proving Ground, Haller's ex-wife Maggie McPherson is struggling to come to terms with losing her home in Pacific Palisades.

"I was well into this book when the fires happened," explains Connelly. "Maybe this is an over-reaching of my ego, but I was thinking, 'Hey, I'm an LA writer and my books are contemporary. How could I write a book that doesn't at least touch on that?'

"Then it becomes a balance. You don't want to be exploitative, but it was very significant and continues to be a very significant thing. The scars are evident - I know dozens of people who lost homes. So how can I think I'm speaking for LA in my books if I don't mention it?"

Connelly himself lost a Malibu property in the fires. "It was a house we went to on weekends," he says. "I miss the place a lot, but I'm talking to you from my main home, and I know people who lost everything. I don't want to make it about me, but it did help me write about it. It gave me a sense of the loss and the devastation, to go to a place that you love and there is zero left - nothing, everything melted and destroyed."

He adds: "I'm a journalist. I take something that's true and I move it around and change things about so it's fiction.

"But that experience helped me a lot because my wife spent a ton of time on that house and now it's gone."

LA Mayor Karen Bass has come in for fierce criticism over her handling of the wildfires, having cut some £12million from the fire department's budget amid reports of low water pressure at hydrants and inadequate supplies.

Perhaps that's a future case for Haller?

Clearly the cogs are always whirring, even if it's too early to say.

"That to me is the wonder of what I do," Connelly adds.

"I get a chance to write an entertaining mystery and, within that, ask some questions and reflect, hopefully accurately, what's going on in society.

"I hope this book raises questions in people's minds about AI, and opens their eyes a little bit. I think we'll get it right eventually, that's what usually happens with new technologies.

"There's some aberrations and then the government comes in and says, 'Let's do this right'."

The Proving Ground by Michael Connelly (Orion, £22) is out now

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