#BookReview ‘The Scarecrow’ by Michael Connelly

About the book…

For Jack McEvoy, the killer named The Poet was the last word in evil.

Think again, Jack.

Jack McEvoy is at the end of the line as a crime reporter. Forced to take a buy-out from the Los Angeles Times as the newspaper grapples with dwindling revenues, he’s got only a few days left on the job. His last assignment? Training his replacement, a low-cost reporter just out of journalism school. But Jack has other plans for his exit. He is going to go out with a bang — a final story that will win the newspaper journalism’s highest honor — a Pulitzer prize.
Jack focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer from the projects who has confessed to police that he brutally raped and strangled one of his crack clients. Jack convinces Alonzo’s mother to cooperate with his investigation into the possibility of her son’s innocence.

But she has fallen for the oldest reporter’s trick in the book. Jack’s real intention is to use his access to report and write a story that explains how societal dysfunction and neglect created a 16-year-old killer.
But as Jack delves into the story he soon realizes that Alonzo’s so-called confession is bogus, and Jack is soon off and running on the biggest story he’s had since The Poet crossed his path years before. He reunites with FBI Agent Rachel Walling to go after a killer who has worked completely below police and FBI radar—and with perfect knowledge of any move against him.
What Jack doesn’t know is that his investigation has inadvertently set off a digital tripwire. The killer knows Jack is coming—and he’s ready.

The books of Michael Connelly stake a special hold in my heart, along with John Connolly and Dennis Lehane, as authors my dad and I recommended to each other, talk for hours about and lent to each other. I am not sure if the hardcover copy of ‘The Scarecrow’ was his or mine, but I figured that what would have been his 69th birthday this June, was as good an opportunity as any to crack the spine of Jack McEvoy’s second outing.

And I finished it at white hot heat only a day later….no matter who the protagonist is (and I know Bosch and Haller have special places in the hearts of Connelly’s fans, give Jack a chance!) Connelly never fails to deliver a story with substnace, thrills and most of all, a pulsating heart.

Jack as a journalist has echoes, to my mind, of the Night Stalker himself, Karl Kolchak, not willing to bend to the whims of his bosses or general opinion and after the events of the Poet investigation left him battered and bruised, the threat of impending forced retirement is the last thing he needs.

The job which put him and his loved ones in peril is the one thing he has left to hold onto, so when he goes to write the one final farewell to end all stories. It’s his two fingers up to an industry which has profitted from his work, his trauma and has then discarded him for being ‘too old’.

Except he gets more than he bargains for as he plunges deep into a murder that from the outside, looks like any other disaffected youth crossing the institutionally racist police. And this time, he is dragging a protege along with him….

As he and cub reporter , Angela , dig deeper into the accusations of falsely accusing Alonzo of murder, the more they become aware of a larger pattern that indicates a mastermind who will make the Poet look like a mere novice . The Scarecrow, so called because he guards fields of data and keeps anyone who shouldn’t be there away from the valuable crops of data and personal information, is someone who will take Jack to hell with him any way that he can. And when Jack accidentally alerts the Scarecrow to his presence, this cat and mouse game becomes very deadly indeed…

Prescient and very much ahead of its time on the accessibility of data believed to be held ‘safely’, this another top notch thriller from a  top notch writer.

About the author….

Having sold – to date – more than seventy-four million copies of his novels worldwide, Philadelphia-born author Michael Connelly is one of the most successful crime writers working today. A lifelong fan of Raymond Chandler, Connelly worked as a journalist, co-authoring a magazine story that was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize.

His first novel, The Black Echo, won the prominent Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992 and launched the phenomenally popular Harry Bosch series. He is also the author of the Mickey Haller series as well as several stand-alone novels and other mini-series. His novels ‘‘Blood Work’ and ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ have both been successfully adapted for screen.

Links-https://www.michaelconnelly.com/

Twitter @Connellybooks @orionbooks