Oh, mid-‘90s, how quaint you seem in this book published in ‘96 with your dial-up internet connections, faxes, pagers, landline phones, and new-fangled digital cameras. It should appeal to large numbers of crime fiction readers, and even if it is not quite as good as several of Connelly's other novels, that's only because Connelly himself has set the bar so high.
This is a tense, well-written book that is especially illuminating about the methods that the FBI uses for profiling and chasing serial killers. Along the way, Jack will become involved with a beautiful FBI agent named Rachel Walling and before all is said and done, Jack winds up putting himself in the sights of the deadly Poet. Jack forces his way into the investigation and so has a close up view of the investigation and the hunt for the perpetrator who becomes known as The Poet. Jack ultimately convinces several departments to reopen these cases and when it becomes clear that Jack is right, the FBI comes on board. Jack now begins to have second thoughts and ultimately concludes that Sean did not kill himself but was, in fact, the victim of a serial killer who has been targeting homicide detectives.
In researching the subject, he discovers that a number of other homicide detective across the country have apparently committed suicide in ways similar to his brother, Sean. Jack is reluctant to believe that his brother would do such a thing, but the evidence seems overwhelming, and McEvoy ultimately accepts it.Īs a reporter, Jack specializes in writing about homicide cases and he decides to do an article on his brother's death. Everyone assumes that Sean was unable to live with his failure and so decided to take his own life. Sean had been severely depressed, agonizing over his failure to solve a particularly brutal homicide. The book opens with the apparent suicide of McEvoy's twin brother, Sean, a Denver homicide detective. McEvoy is well drawn, but he's not nearly as compelling or as interesting as Bosch. In truth, though, the author doesn't begin to inhabit the character of Jack McEvoy in the same way and to the same depth as he does the character of his more noted series protagonist, homicide detective Harry Bosch.
One would think that Connelly would have this character nailed. This seems a bit odd, because the protagonist in this book is a newspaper reporter and Connelly was himself a reporter for a good number of years before he became a novelist. Measured against the standard set by most crime fiction writers, this is a pretty good book, but based against the standard set by Michael Connelly it's sort of average, somewhere in the middle of the pack of the large number of books he has now produced.
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