Friday May 29, 2009

Blog intruder

Review by MARTIN SPICE

The Scarecrow

Author: Michael Connelly

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company, 415 pages

THERE is a paragraph a third of the way through Michael Connelly’s new book, The Scarecrow, that should be compulsory reading for everyone who writes a blog. Carver, the villain of the piece, is looking to track down Angela Cook, a Los Angeles crime reporter.

“It was always amazing to Carver how trusting or naïve young people were. They didn’t believe that anyone could connect the dots. They believed that they could bear their souls on the Internet, post photos and information at will, and not expect any consequences. From her blog, he was able to glean all the information he needed about Angela Cook. Her hometown, her college sorority, even her dog’s name. He knew Death Cab for Cutie was her favourite band and pizza at a place called Mozza was her favourite food. In between the meaningless data he learned her birthday and that she only had to walk two blocks from her apartment to get her favourite pizza at her favourite restaurant. He was circling her and she didn’t even know it. But each time he got closer.”

And then too close. Carver is the latest in a long line of Connelly’s serial killers and it seems almost to have become a tradition with the author that a calling card is left with a reference to another one of them – in this case the Poet, which established one of his longest-running detectives, Harry Bosch. This time, there is no Bosch, but the book written about the Poet case by Jack McEvoy, the central character in The Scarecrow, has clearly been an influence on The Scarecrow himself, alias Carver.

This inter-relatedness of Connelly’s villains and heroes is a nice little twist for fans who enjoy spotting the references, in the same way that Alfred Hitchcock fans enjoy keeping an eye out for the master’s signature appearance in his films.

McEvoy is an LA Times crime reporter, long on the beat and in the tooth, who is made redundant as the book opens. The reason? He is too expensive. As the paper seeks to cut costs, the paper’s policy is to fire 100 of its staff. McEvoy is number 99. He determines that he will leave with a bang, and a chance telephone call gives him his break. A body has been found in the trunk of a car and a dope dealing kid from the dodgy south side of town has been arrested and charged after confessing to the murder. Case closed. Or at least it is until McEvoy gets the phone call and decides to investigate further.

McEvoy is another great Connelly protagonist. The Harry Bosch novels are legendary, then came the Lincoln Lawyer successes and now there is McEvoy, suddenly promoted to the foreground. He is a highly successful crime reporter (as was Connelly) whose time is running out. His enforced retirement is a result of corporate policy rather than a comment on his abilities.

As always with a Connelly novel, however, it is the pace and plotting that carry you through in the grip of yet another excellent thriller. Carver is a worthy villain, setting out his modus operandi from the very start of the book. He runs a server “farm”, a secure repository for digital information, an unbreachable fortress of gleaming towers of data.

In the digital age we all live in, this is a chilling start. As we write our blogs or connect with our friends and family on Facebook we probably give little thought to the information we are putting out there for anyone to see and make use of. Carver is a master of exploiting it. The fate of anyone trying to breach any of the security systems on his farm is brutal and short. “Carver and his young disciples would loot his personal bank accounts, take his identity and hide photos of men having sex with eight-year-old boys on his work computer. Then he would crash it with a replicating virus. When the intruder couldn’t fix it, he would call in an expert. The photos would be found and the police would be called.”

Yet again, Connelly delivers in The Scarecrow. McEvoy is a new central character every bit as compelling as Connelly’s earlier protagonists and Carver is as creepy and warped a villain as he has created. Given Connelly’s consummate skills, what more could you ask for?