After making a brief appearance in Michael Connelly’s previous novel, The Brass Verdict, Los Angeles Times reporter Jack McEvoy returns with a novel of his own in The Scarecrow. It’s hard to believe it’s been 13 years since Connelly — and presumably McEvoy — published The Poet, a case McEvoy solved while looking into the death of his brother. Similar to The Poet, where homicides of law enforcement officers were made to look like suicides, The Scarecrow features a trunk murder where the killer frames an unwitting suspect. Again, McEvoy makes the connection and once again, FBI agent Rachel Walling risks her job as she helps McEvoy investigate and falls in love with him. In true Connelly fashion, the Times newsroom scenes are totally realistic as Connelly worked as a crime reporter for the paper in the late 1980s before leaving the profession to become a novelist. As someone who left the newspaper industry in 2001, Connelly’s portrayal of the dying print business strikes a chord, as does the book’s polar opposite setting, a high-tech data center in Arizona. As Connelly and McEvoy turn the page on print journalism, I look forward to a future novel where we can see Connelly’s take on — and McEvoy’s work in — Web journalism.

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