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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 paperto 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.
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By C. Smith (Los Angeles, CA)
an entertaining mystery but not up to Connelly's usual extraordinary standards. I was tempted to give it three stars, but realized that if the book had been written by an unknown writer I would have considered it a four star mystery, so that's what I gave it
By Susan Y. Schoonover (Boulder, CO)
THE SCARECROW is an average to above average thriller that is actually a followup to Connelly's THE POET which was published in the 90's. I read THE POET at the time of publication but have only the dimmest memory of it and reading that novel is not necessary to follow this one. Los Angeles journalist Jack McEvoy is the hero of THE SCARECROW while Connelly's most frequent protagonist LA cop Harry Bosch does not appear in the story and there is only a mere passing mention of Bosch's half brother and new Connelly leading man Mickey, "the Lincoln lawyer."
The story is very contemporary and has the changes wrought by the internet as a major theme. Jack is being downsized from his newspaper job because of competition from online news sources. The serial killers use the world wide web to find each other, their victims and lots of important information that help them elude detection. The first part of the book is the best as the plot loses momentum toward the last third or so. THE SCARECROW is not a terrible book to spend some diverting time with but it is not one that is particularly memorable or thought provoking.
By Hershel Parker (Morro Bay, California United States)
This is one of Connelly's best mysteries. It is also an obituary for all newspapers, although focused on the Los Angeles TIMES. Not everyone will grieve with Connelly as I do. I was in email contact with an editor at the LA TIMES on a day when 140 people were let go. I have spent months, all told, in the old NYPL Annex and many other libraries reading nineteenth-century newspapers, my head in a microfilm reader or standing in pain over low flat tables turning big pages or, very rarely, working at a high slanted stand kind to the back. I have a special love of American papers when 10 or 12 papers were in tough competition and another 20 or 25 catered to special audiences. Many, many other readers of Connelly will bring their own newspaper history to THE SCARECROW, and grieve in their way. This is a fine mystery, but it is more. This early tribute to the vanishing newspaper may remain one of the most heartbreaking anyone ever writes.
By Sam Fisher (LA, USA)
As a dedicated fan of Michael Connelly's work, the sequel to the award-winning poet is a very good page-turner that is exciting and filled with vivid depictions of locales and police procedure, and in this book modern digital technology plays a large part in the plot. While most of the technology is quite accurately depicted, the security part seems a little far-fetched, for someone like me who has worked in the field, I have to say common law firms most likely will not use this kind of services. However my major complain is how the story is structured, that the villain is revealed in the beginning so the reader know exactly who he is. While this plays into the story of the limited cat and mouse chase the writer has represented, it takes away the mystery and the twist the author is good at, as in the Poet, we would have kept guessing till the end who the murderer was. But in this book, we knew who he was from the beginning and his every move, some of them smart and devious, but some of them, mostly towards the ending, childish and impossible, as the plot has demanded, the bad guy makes mistakes and losses. Aside from my complains, this is still a very well-written book, and even at his worst, not to say this book was his worst work, Connelly is still much better than a lot of best-selling authors out there.
By Joshua Mauthe (Nashville, TN)
I discovered after finishing this that Connelly was partially inspired to return to the Jack McEvoy character (from The Poet) after watching season five of The Wire; its scathing portrait of the newspaper business and its current status made Connelly interested in visiting some of the same territory. I've long argued that Connelly isn't the greatest writer in the world, but his sense of time and place - whether the post-Rodney King LA of the Bosch novels or the increasingly downsized Los Angeles Times of this one - and his strong sense of verisimilitude more than make up for his pedestrian style. The Scarecrow is no exception, and in some ways, it may be one of his best books in a long time. The main story - about McEvoy being given his two-weeks notice, his desire to go out with a bang, and the way that leads him into the sights of a long working but unknown serial killer - is a great one, and Connelly milks the suspense for everything its worth. (His use of alternating sections between McEvoy and the killer is intriguing; not only does it allow him to add to the suspense, it adds more depth to the villain than we could otherwise get.) But the book is just as worthy for its subtext about the declining state of newspapers; while McEvoy isn't as complex or rewarding a character as Bosch, his strong commitment to journalism makes him a great character for Connelly (himself a crime reporter for many years) to write about. A great serial killer tale, a nice exploration of the media, and more, The Scarecrow is a must for any Connelly fan.
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