The Scarecrow
by Michael Connelly
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael ConnellyEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-05-26
ISBN: 0316166308
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Book Reviews of The Scarecrow
Book Review: "Death is my beat...I make my living from it. I forge my professional reputation on it."
Summary: 4 Stars
Jack McEvoy and Rachel Walling, who were the main characters in Connelly's first novel about a serial killer, The Poet, return in this novel, in which they are chasing another serial killer. This killer is a genius with the computer, able to get into any personal account anywhere to deny service, plant phony evidence, close out bank accounts, cancel plane reservations, or spy on e-mails and interoffice communications. What's worse--he works for an internet security agency, and he is so clever that no one is even aware that a seemingly straightforward murder investigation involves a serial killer at all. Jack, a respected and relatively well paid reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has just been given two weeks to finish up his stories before he is laid off from the paper.
Jack (like Connelly), the author of a book about a serial killer called The Poet several years ago, has decided that if he's going to leave the paper, he's going to write a sensational final story. When he receives a phone call from a woman who claims that the police have jailed her juvenile son for a murder he never committed, Jack and a photographer go off to the projects to interview her. Though Alonzo Winslow may have been involved in any number of other crimes, including the sale of drugs, Jack becomes convinced that he did not, in fact, confess to the murder for which he is currently jailed--the torture and suffocation of a woman who was then stuffed into the trunk of a car, a plastic bag around her neck. Jack is soon up to his eyeballs in complications, chasing down leads and looking up old cases.
Connelly keeps the action coming fast and furiously, and when Jack contacts FBI agent Rachel Walling, with whom he solved the case of The Poet, years ago, the action ratchets up even further, providing a complicated love interest at the same time. The author's prose style is efficient and effective as he alternates first-person accounts by Jack McEvoy with third-person narratives involving the computer expert who seems to be pulling all the strings and playing games with his pursuers. Unfortunately, though Jack McEvoy and Rachel Walling develop into characters with individuality, Connelly reveals almost nothing about the computer genius at the heart of the mystery.
An early but fleeting scene from the man's childhood is not explained or developed until the last pages of the book, and his motivation for these grisly murders is never explained. While this may increase the tension and drama as Jack is pursuing the killer, it makes the ending much less satisfying than it would have been if we had been allowed entrée into the "whys" his behavior. Ironically, Connelly himself anticipates this criticism when Jack McEvoy eventually decides to write a book about this case, announcing that his editor has told him that "The record of grim deeds [the man] committed cannot overshadow the motivations behind it...I must be able to tell more than what happened. I must tell why." It is too bad that Michael Connelly did not heed the same advice during the more than four hundred pages of this novel. n Mary Whipple
The Brass Verdict: A Novel (Harry Bosch)
The Lincoln Lawyer
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