Review:The Scarecrow

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POSTED: 09 MAY 2009

Michael Connelly, The Scarecrow

(Allen & Unwin; 416pp paperback; $32.99)

Put together a soon-to-be-redundant journalist bent on going out with a Watergate-like scoop, and an über-intelligent serial killer come computer geek, and you have the makings of a bestseller built on some of the major global anxieties of today — random violence, employment instability, computer fraud, invasion of privacy, and identity theft.

No wonder Michael Connelly’s latest thriller, The Scarecrow, is compelling reading.

Jack McEvoy, the journalist in question, is a crime reporter for a major Los Angeles newspaper. Like print newspapers in the real world, the emergence of the internet has crippled revenue and forced staff cuts. Jack, a highly paid “ace” reporter, is given 30 days to finish up and train his replacement — an eager, cheap and rather unprincipled young graduate. Nice.

Jack has a pride in his craft and wants to end his career on a fitting note. He decides to follow up a phone call he might otherwise dismiss as just another crank call, in the hope it will lead to a feature story on social dysfunction.

The call, from the grandmother of a disadvantaged youth indicted for murder, accuses Jack of slackness and complicity in a frame-up. Jack has heard the “my son is innocent” story too many times, but his cynicism is challenged as he investigates the “confession” and police records.

Any investigation, research or just plain nosiness these days must include a search on the internet, and when Angela — Jack's understudy — googles key words describing the murder, she triggers off an automatic digital alarm which electronically notifies the real killer, our IT wizard, that someone is on his case.

Like most of us who use the internet, I have enough skill to find information, buy things, do banking and so on, but I know nothing about the workings, management or governance of the online world. The ability of the killer in this story to invade sites, hack passwords, delete or create emails, falsify data, stop credit cards and generally go undetected is nightmare territory for us proles. He must be caught!

It is that kind of book — intriguing, fast-paced, touching on real fears and the real world — that you really can’t put down, because you want to get to the end, you want the baddies tied up and the world put to rights. Then you can get back to your e-bay bid — those sunglasses were so cool.

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