Sure, it happens at the movies all the time. Somebody jumps out of the darkness with a knife and we all shudder. A whole film genre has been based on such scares. But when was the last time that happened to you while reading a book?
For me, that happened just last week, at the halfway point of The Scarecrow (Little, Brown, $27.99) by Michael Connelly. Even though you know something is up, the moment that makes you jump and do your Good-God! James Brown impression hits you with the same shock and fear that grips the novel’s hero, Jack McEvoy.
Moments like that make you appreciate what a great novelist Connelly has become. His books will still be read 75 years from now in the same way that college students are required to read Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain. Connelly leaves most of his contemporaries in the dust.
The Scarecrow doesn’t feature Connelly’s main attraction, L.A. Detective Harry Bosch, but instead focuses on newspaper reporter McEvoy, the central character in Connelly’s The Poet and a supporting character in a couple of other Connelly books.
This story grows from the freak show that is the modern newspaper business. McEvoy is a dedicated and talented veteran journalist, so he is laid off from the Los Angeles Times and forced to train his young-sprout replacement, a naïve and ambitious rookie from the University of Florida. Connelly vents a lot about what’s happened to the newspaper business — he was an LA Times star for several years before becoming a novelist — but uses that heartbreak to open the door to yet another thrilling narrative. It’s a great tale about a cast-aside reporter on the trail of a bad-ass computer-whiz serial killer. That the book also shows evidence of the immorality of big-time journalism is an added bonus.
It’s a thrilling, masterful book and it reminds us of why we love to read: we love to get caught in the web by a brilliant storyteller. Connelly lives in the area and he has a few shoutouts to Florida homies that make the book even more fun.
It seems that it was just 20 minutes ago that Connelly published his last novel, The Brass Verdict, and he’s got another one — Nine Dragons, the latest Harry Bosch novel — coming out in October. Janet Maslin of the New York Times is always a tough review, but she praised The Scarecrow, then said at the end of her review that Connelly was too prolific, that he needed to slow down. But Dude — as long as the books are this good, please … please keep them coming.
This article appears in Jun 3-9, 2009.