BOOK OF THE DAY:The Scarecrow By Michael Connelly Orion 419pp, £18.99
MICHAEL CONNELLY is best known for his Harry Bosch series of thrillers, but his 20th novel is a standalone which reprises the character of journalist Jack McEvoy, last encountered in The Poet(1996), when McEvoy uncovered the identity of the eponymous serial killer while working the crime beat for the Rocky Mountain News.
As the novel opens, McEvoy has long since graduated to writing for the LA Times, and is something of a minor celebrity for his bestselling book about tracking down the Poet. His fame – and high salary – work against him when the newspaper gives him his pink slip during the latest round of job cuts, leaving McEvoy determined to go out on a high by writing a feature that will prove the innocence of a teenager accused of torturing and murdering an exotic dancer. His investigations, however, bring him to the attention of the woman's real killer, the Scarecrow. Given the journalist's notoriety, the Scarecrow believes McEvoy will prove a worthy foe and a notable scalp . . .
Michael Connelly worked as a crime reporter (in Florida and Los Angeles) before turning to writing fiction, and was once short-listed for a Pulitzer Prize. It’s no surprise, then, that there’s a rare authenticity to his account of an LA crime reporter’s exploits, and particularly in terms of the novel’s style. Written in a spare but detailed fashion, it is unusually low-key for a serial killer novel, which tend on the whole to err on the lurid side. Connelly’s experiences of dealing with the police and judicial system stand him in good stead, as McEvoy quietly navigates the labyrinth of a post-murder scenario with an insider’s ease.
Eschewing linguistic pyrotechnics, Connelly writes as McEvoy would, as a responsible journalist recording facts rather than a hack bent on exploiting vulnerable people for the sake of a headline. It’s a fine line for a thriller writer to walk, but Connelly pulls it off with aplomb.
Where there is authorial intrusion is in Connelly’s account of the worm’s-eye view of the evisceration of American journalism.
Clearly appalled at the ongoing downsizing of newspapers, and the resultant shrinkage in quality journalism, Connelly puts his words into the mouth of the cynical McEvoy: “Like the paper and ink newspaper itself, my time was over. It was about the internet now. It was about hourly uploads to online editions and blogs. It was about television tie-ins and Twitter updates. It was about filing stories on your phone rather than using it to call rewrite. The morning paper might as well have been called the Daily Afterthought.”
Connelly’s pursuit of authenticity does mean that the narrative becomes bogged down in places, especially when it comes to doling out chunks of technological information about the internet, which the Scarecrow, an IT expert, uses to select and target his victims. A further irritation is the author’s insistence on regularly switching between McEvoy’s first-person voice and the third-person voice of the Scarecrow.
Connelly brings little that is groundbreaking to the serial killer novel with The Scarecrow, but he understands what makes for a compelling read. Jack McEvoy is a fascinating character, the classic world-weary cynic with a cast-iron conscience, and it is to be hoped it won't be another decade before he surfaces again.
The ScarecrowBy Michael Connelly Orion 419pp, £18.99
Declan Burke is a journalist and writer. His latest novel is The Big O. He blogs about Irish crime fiction at Crime Always Pays.
