The Poet by Michael Connelly

 I absolutely loved this book! I've spent the last eight years working my way through Connelly's body of work as I find them in different libraries as audiobooks which is especially fun with the Bosch series since Titus Welliver, who plays Bosch on the great Amazon Prime series, reads the latest books. As a result of my method, I haven't had access to his earlier books on audio since they're harder to find or more likely to have been damaged by the sands of time. But when Fair Warning was released this past year, I didn't want to read it before I read the other McEvoy novels, so here we are. 

Just damn. This is Connelly's best book. McEvoy is an engaging and empathetic character, you're hooked right into the plot quickly and emotionally. The twists and turns are spectacular. The basic set up is that Jack McEvoy is a reporter whose twin brother, a police detective, kills himself. The more McEvoy looks at the suicide though, the more things seem to not add up. 

For me, the most difficult part of the book was adjusting to having a shared narrative that shifted from McEvoy to the antagonist's perspective. I haven't come across that style before in any of Connelly's other books so it was a little jarring. As a new parent, getting through some of the discussions of pedophilia in the book was certainly difficult at times.  It was intriguing to try and figure out how the two narratives were related to each other since it wasn't obvious from the beginning of the book. I can't say too much more about the plot itself without ruining the experience of reading it yourself.

On a different note, I also found it fascinating to see how computers and the internet were starting to filter into everyday life in the late 90s. The Poet was originally published in 96 and it shows, but not in a bad way. You get a great feel for what it was like having to use phone lines and dial up connections. Having to explain in the text of a book what a digital camera is really shows how quickly technology has changed and been integrated into all of our lives. Who could have imagined thirty years ago that we all would be walking around with high definition photo and video cameras in our pocket that could almost instantly send whatever we want through the air to someone on the other side of the world? I know I find myself taking our ability to communicate and document our lives for granted today. All of which is to say, that I found that the way that technology impacts the story was completely accurate to the time of the book and didn't take anything away from the plot. If anything, it actually helped the plot by adding in even more suspense with the difficulty to get information across the country in a speedy manner. The much much newer book There's Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins pulled off a similar suspenseful effect with a book set in modern times by locating it out in the country with shoddy cell reception. 

On the other hand, if you're one of those who feels that it's a cardinal sin for an author to hide evidence or clues from the reader, you might be a little annoyed with this book. I'll have to read it again, but I think that the key piece of evidence that reveals the identity of the murderer of McEvoy's brother is a buried lead that isn't revealed before it's appearance. Personally, I can overlook this one quibble since the entire rest of the book is magisterial and there are enough other pieces of circumstantial evidence to connect the Ts and cross the Is.....or something like that. Connelly sometimes walks that line between procedural detective story and thriller very closely, so you need to be prepared to accept a little bleed-over from between the two styles. 

All of which is to say, I am so exceedingly pleased that I can still find gems like this in the work of an author I've already been reading for almost ten years! I've got the next book in the McEvoy series, The Scarecrow, waiting for me at the library already. Cannot recommend more enthusiastically. 10/10.