Connelly is the bestselling author of 38 novels and one work of non-fiction, with over 74 million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into 40 languages.

In March 2011, the movie adaptation of Connelly's novel The Lincoln Lawyer starred Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller.

[5] According to Connelly, his father was a frustrated artist who encouraged his children to want to succeed in life[6] and was a risk taker who alternated between success and failure in his pursuit of a career.

[4] At age 12, Connelly moved with his family from Philadelphia to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where he attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School.

At age 16, Connelly's interest in crime and mystery escalated when, on his way home from his work as a hotel dishwasher, he witnessed a man throw an object into a hedge.

[4] After graduating from the University of Florida in 1980, Connelly got a job as a crime beat writer at the Daytona Beach News-Journal, where he worked for almost two years until he went to the Fort Lauderdale News and Sun-Sentinel in 1981.

[3] He stayed with the paper for a few years and in 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of the 1985 Delta Flight 191 plane crash, which story earned Connelly a place as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

[6] He sold The Black Echo to Little, Brown to be published in 1992 and won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for Best first Novel.

[4] Michael Connelly received a good deal of publicity in 1994, when President Bill Clinton came out of a bookstore carrying a copy of The Concrete Blonde in front of the waiting cameras.

[4] In 1997, Connelly returned to Bosch in Trunk Music before writing another book, Blood Work (1997), about a different character, FBI agent Terry McCaleb.

Blood Work was made into a film in 2002, directed by Clint Eastwood, who also played McCaleb,[4] an agent with a transplanted heart, in pursuit of his donor's murderer.

[3] When asked if he had anything against the changes made to fit the big screen, Connelly simply replied: "If you take their money, it's their turn to tell the story".

It was followed by The Lincoln Lawyer in October, Connelly's first legal novel; it features defense attorney Mickey Haller, Bosch's half-brother.

The Reversal (October 2010), reunites Bosch & Haller as they work together under the banner of the state on the retrial of a child murderer.

The Drop, which refers in part to the "Deferred Retirement Option Plan" that was described in the novel The Brass Verdict (2008),[12] was published in November 2011.

For example, City of Bones, in which Detective Bosch investigates the murder of an 11-year-old boy, was written during Connelly's early years as a father of a daughter, and it hit close to home.

[31] David Geherin states that Connelly "deliberately avoids ornate language, the kind that makes the reader stop and savor the choice of words or elegant phrasing.

In Void Moon, Connelly frequently alternates between following protagonist Cassie Black and antagonist Jack Karch.