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Summary
Summary
Forced out of the Los Angeles Times amid the latest budget cuts, newspaperman Jack McEvoy decides to go out with a bang, using his final days at the paper to write the definitive murder story of his career.
He focuses on Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old drug dealer in jail after confessing to a brutal murder. But as he delves into the story, Jack realizes that Winslow's so-called confession is bogus. The kid might actually be innocent.
Jack is soon running with his biggest story since The Poetmade his career years ago. He is tracking a killer who operates completely below police radar--and with perfect knowledge of any move against him. Including Jack's.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Connelly hits it out of the park with one of the best thrillers of the year. Seasoned reporter Jack McEvoy has just been laid off from his job at the Los Angeles Times and-to add insult to injury-is assigned to train his replacement, a precocious young woman who will work for half his salary with none of his experience. But McEvoy will not go gently into the land of the downsized: he still has one last story to cover featuring a killer who dumps his victims in the trunk of a car. Peter Giles brings a skilled and intimate feel to his reading without losing the chilling momentum; at one point he relays a beautifully built scene that contains one of the best "gotcha" moments in some time. A Little, Brown hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 30). (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
New York Review of Books Review
That keening voice you hear in THE SCARECROW (Little, Brown, $27.99) belongs to a Michael Connelly you may not know - not the best-selling author riding high on his 20th novel, but the newspaper guy who started out covering the crime beat for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and went on to become a top crime reporter for The Los Angeles Times. That voice was a lot cockier in "The Poet," the 1996 thriller in which Connelly introduced Jack McEvoy, a hotshot Denver newsman who parlays a much too personal encounter with a poetry-spouting serial killer into a best-selling book and a ride out of town to a bigger paper. Here, the voice is considerably more subdued and more than a little desperate, as Jack, who has just been pink-slipped at The Los Angeles Times, latches on to another psycho as his professional meal ticket, envisioning one last great story before The Times, if not the entire newspaper industry, goes down in flames./ Connelly, who has the nerve and timing of a whole SWAT team, gives Jack two weeks to find the creep who's been raping and killing attractive long-legged women and dumping their remains in car trunks - if his young replacement doesn't beat him to the story. But this ambitious upstart is too lovely and leggy for her own good, and the smart money's on Jack. To make the story sexier, Jack picks up a partner - Rachel Walling, the supersmart F.B.I. agent who jeopardized her career for him in "The Poet." These two follow the Internet trail of identity theft, pornography Web sites, electronic surveillance and industrial sabotage right to its source, a vast data processing and storage operation known as "the farm" and protected by a certain mastermind known as the Scarecrow./ But the damage done by this electronically savvy killer is nothing compared with the slaughter of the nation's newspapers, which Connelly compresses into the grim fight for life going on at The Los Angeles Times. Once "the best place in the world to work" but now "an intellectual ghost town," its ominously quiet newsroom is the harbinger of a time when there will be no eyes left to watch the nation or voices to sound an alarm. "In many ways," Jack says in his chilling requiem for the industry, "I was relieved that I would not be around to see it."/ Nancy Drew drives her own blue roadster. Harriet the Spy travels in a chauffeured limousine. Emma Graham, Martha Grimes's 12-year-old sleuth, takes taxis and trains. Flavia de Luce, the 11-year-old heroine of Alan Bradley's first mystery, THE SWEETNESS AT THE BOTTOM OF THE PIE (Delacorte, $23), goes her way on a beat-up bicycle she calls Gladys, more independent and demonstrably naughtier than her literary sister-sleuths./ The neglected youngest daughter of a widower who never looks up from his precious stamp collection, Flavia takes refuge from her loneliness in the magnificent Victorian chemistry laboratory an ancestor installed at the family's estate in the English countryside. With "An Elementary Study of Chemistry" as her bible, the precocious child has become an expert in poisons - a nasty skill that gets her in trouble when she melts down a sister's pearls, but serves her well when a stranger turns up dead in the cucumber patch and her father is arrested for murder. Impressive as a sleuth and enchanting as a mad scientist ("What a jolly poison could be extracted from the jonquil"), Flavia is most endearing as a little girl who has learned how to amuse herself in a big lonely house./ If WHISPERS OF THE DEAD (Delacorte, $26) sends readers to Simon Beckett's fine previous mysteries, "The Chemistry of Death" and "Written in Bone," then justice will have been served. Maybe it's only a matter of crossed cultural wires, but David Hunter, the author's engaging British sleuth, fails to thrive when he pays a visit to the Forensic Anthropology Center ("the Body Farm") in Knoxville, Tenn., where he trained early in his career. While there, he's roped into looking for a creative serial killer who leaves the corpses of his tortured victims in incongruous settings./ Beckett handles the gruesome morgue chores with scrupulous scientific rigor, and his entomological knowledge of the feeding and breeding habits of maggots is awesome. But his crudely drawn American characters, so un-Southern in their rudeness, treat the eminent Dr. Hunter like dirt and seem to view his native Britain as some poky developing nation. "I'm sure you're well enough respected back home," one of them says, "but this is Tennessee." Well, not really./ Jack Liffey, the private investigator in John Shannon's mysteries, works the roughest territory in the genre - the subculture of the Southern California teenager. "I'm not really a detective," the big-hearted P.I. explains in PALOS VERDES BLUE (Pegasus, $25). "My practice is limited to looking for missing children." That doesn't begin to describe the harrowing rescue job he undertakes when he begins searching for a schoolgirl with a passionate commitment to protecting butterflies and other endangered species, including the illegal Mexican workers camping out on the cliffs above Lunada Bay. Unaware that his own impetuous teenage daughter is endangering herself by trying to help him, Liffey patiently excavates the area's social strata, uncovering layers of antagonism among the privileged rich and their anonymous day laborers, rival surfer gangs and a racist militia group prowling the hills - hostility that bounces right back at parents from their alienated children./ Michael Connelly's thriller features a savvy killer - and the slaughter of the newspaper industry./
