The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly

The Scarecrow, by Michael Connelly, (New York: Hachette Book Group; 2008), 562 pages.

In The Scarecrow, Michael Connelly goes back to the old well of The Poet, and takes another drink.  The characters from that book feature again in The Scarecrow in another story about the hunt for a serial killer. The principal character, Jack McEvoy is an all-but-washed up journalist at the Los Angeles Times. While reporting on a murder confession, he discovers, and believes, that a confessed killer has been framed and that the real murderer is a serial killer. Unable to convince the Los Angeles Police Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and his own employer of the merits of his theory, McEvoy attempts to solve the crime himself, and in the long a circuitous investigation, gets his co-worker killed but like all goes journalist heroes, gets his killer in the end.

As the cover blurb notes, this book is "high-grade entertainment," and suitable written to retain the reader's attention through surprises and twists. Connelly is an entertaining writer, and this book is of sufficient quality to live up to the author's reputation of producing crime fiction at its best. Readers of crime fiction should find this book adequately entertaining, as long as you can accommodate the fact that the entire story's premise is that a journalist is more capable of solving a string of murders than two law enforcement agencies. If readers can rationalize away that fact they should enjoy this book.