Review by New York Times 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./
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Former Los Angeles Times crime reporter Connelly has said that his goal in writing The Scarecrow was to come up with a story that would be a thriller first and a torch song to the newspaper business second. He succeeds on both counts. By bringing back Jack McEvoy, the reporter star of The Poet (1996), and by beginning the novel with McEvoy downsized from his job as crime reporter for the Times, Connelly puts both plotlines in gear. McEvoy, determined to go out with guns blazing, plans on writing a story about how poverty turns a 16-year-old into a killer, but he quickly learns that the kid's confession is bogus. That unlocks the door to a serial killer every bit as warped, perverted, and brilliant as the Poet, the case that made McEvoy's career. It also leads to a reunion, both professional and romantic, with FBI agent Rachel Walling, who has also been popping up in Connelly's Harry Bosch novels recently. Not surprisingly, Connelly nails the death-of-newspapers theme, from the gallows humor of the reporters watching their world crumble to the callousness of the bureaucrats in charge of the dismantling. What will drive this novel for most readers, though, is its villain, the Scarecrow, a computer genius who operates a data storage center, or server farm, providing security for all manner of Web sites. Except, the Scarecrow doesn't just protect his clients' data; he also mines it for victims. Alternating point of view between villain and reporter, Connelly builds tension expertly, using dramatic irony to its fullest, screw-tightening potential. Even confirmed Harry Bosch fans will have to admit that this Harry-less novel is one of Connelly's very best.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2009 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bestseller Connelly comments on the plight of print journalism in a nail-biting thriller featuring reporter Jack McEvoy, last seen in 2004's The Narrows. When Jack is laid off from the L.A. Times with 14 days' notice to tie up loose ends, he decides to go out with a bang. What starts as a story about the wrongful arrest of a young gangbanger for the brutal rape and murder of an exotic dancer turns out to be just the tip of an iceberg that takes McEvoy from the Nevada desert to a futuristic data-hosting facility in Arizona. FBI agent Rachel Walling, with whom he worked on a serial killer case in 1996's The Poet, soon joins the hunt, but as the pair uncover more about the killer and his unsettling predilections, they realize that they too are being hunted. With every switch between McEvoy's voice and the villain's, Connelly ratchets up the tension. This magnificent effort is a reminder of why Connelly is one of today's top crime authors. 8-city author tour. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Connelly has done it again. Reporter Jack McEvoy, the hero of Connelly's earlier novel, The Poet, is back in a chilling new mystery. The latest casualty of corporate downsizing at the Los Angeles Times, Jack decides to end his career with a story about a young drug dealer's arrest for and confession to murder. A phone call from an angry relative gets him to investigate the old case further, and Jack stumbles upon a high-profile serial killer case that might save his job, assuming he can survive long enough to solve it. The newspaper industry is on the verge of collapse these days, and ex-newspaperman Connelly here tackles the subject head-on while juggling an intricate mystery at the same time. He wisely focuses on McEvoy to tell the story, with the occasional interlude from the mastermind behind the attacks, making the narrative terrifying and compelling at the same time. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 1/09.]-Jeff Ayers, Seattle P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Downsized from the Los Angeles Times, crime reporter Jack McEvoy decides to ride one last big story to the moon. There's no mystery about who suffocated stripper Denise Babbit and stuffed her corpse into the trunk of her car, since Alonzo Winslow, 16, confessed to the murder after the LAPD found his fingerprint on the car's mirror. But when Alonzo's motheror maybe it's his grandmother, or bothnags just-fired Jack to look into the case, he quickly realizes that Alonzo's confession isn't a confession at all. And Angela Cook, the twinkie barracuda Jack's been asked to groom as his replacement, alerts him to the earlier murder of Las Vegas showgirl Sharon Oglevy that has all the earmarks of this one, even though her ex-husband's already locked up for it. Clearly there's a serial killer at work, and clearly, though Jack doesn't realize it, it's Wesley Carver, a computer-security expert whose ability to track everyone on earth through cyberspace makes him uniquely sensitive to who might be on his case, and uniquely empowered to neutralize them. After losing his bank balance and his credit cards to identity theft, however, Jack is rescued by Rachel Walling, the FBI agent whose torrid affair with him enlivened his last big story (The Poet, 1996). The ensuing cat-and-mouse game, duly played out in chapters alternately presented from the viewpoints of Jack and Carver, is accomplished but not especially suspenseful for readers who've seen it before. Despite his cyber-powers, Carver isn't an especially scary villain, nor does Jack shine as a sleuth. But Connelly (The Brass Verdict, 2008, etc.), who's nothing if not professional, keeps the twists coming and provides column-inches of background expertiseperhaps more than the story needson the hard business of hard news and a realistic preview of Jack's likely fate. Middling among the distinguished author's score of thrillers. New fans hooked by this one will be happy to know that his backlist is even richer. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
