sábado, 22 de agosto de 2009

THE SCARECROW by Michael Connelly


THE SCARECROW by Michael Connelly

May 21, 2009

Books of The Times


Print Reporter Versus Web, and Sinister Webmaster

By JANET MASLIN

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THE SCARECROW

By Michael Connelly

419 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $27.99.


“The Scarecrow” involves the serial killing of women who are abducted, violently assaulted, asphyxiated and then stuffed in car trunks. The perpetrator of these acts is a kinky beast even by the standards of novels about serial sex crimes. But the trunk murders aren’t the scary part of Michael Connelly’s new story.

These killings are just business as usual for a crime writer as seasoned as Mr. Connelly. They seem almost humdrum in comparison with the larger fears that “The Scarecrow” summons. This book’s main character is the newspaper reporter Jack McEvoy, who was at his professional prime when he triumphed over evil in “The Poet” (1996). At that point Jack was a reporter for The Rocky Mountain News. The death of that newspaper and the slow collapse of The Los Angeles Times, where Jack has now spent seven years, create an unusually ominous backdrop.

And in “The Scarecrow,” as in “The Poet,” the insidious powers of computer technology are part of the overall menace. This time the source of evil cyber-mayhem is the Farm, an underground desert bunker that Mr. Connelly makes frighteningly plausible. The sci-fi phantoms that once sprung from the imagination of Michael Crichton have become realities in this tale of spying, trolling, hacking, identity theft and other spookily disembodied privacy violations.

Jack is one of the revolving Connelly antiheroes who have consciences, ex-wives and authority issues. They form a spectrum of irreverence: Mickey Haller, a k a the Lincoln Lawyer, works out of a car and thumbs his nose at the legal establishment. Harry Bosch, brooding detective, has a rebellious attitude toward the Los Angeles Police Department. Jack’s love of journalism makes him more of a team player. But when he is laid off by The Los Angeles Times at the start of “The Scarecrow,” Jack turns indignant. He spends the rest of the book tracking down the Scarecrow through good, hard reportorial legwork and lamenting the way that such work is becoming obsolete.

Two weeks’ notice: that’s what Jack, “an over-40 cop-shop reporter,” is given as the book begins. But he has one last matter to investigate. His name is on a story about a teenage drug dealer who has made a confession to the police that led to his being held on a murder charge. With the thoroughness and tenacity that make Mr. Connelly’s characters so likable, Jack gumshoes his way to the bottom of this allegation and finds that the kid confessed only to stealing the dead woman’s car. And here’s a nice touch: Jack’s realization that this gangbanger isn’t a killer doesn’t make the kid a victim. When the case attracts news interest, and the suspect is about to be interviewed by CNN, Jack gets him yanked off the air, pointing out that CNN’s ability to bleep is no match for the kid’s ability to spew obscenities.

Cross-cut to this book’s true nerve center: the Farm, where the malevolent figure of the title presides over an empire of data-storage equipment. His name is Wesley Carver, and he is supposed to be a threat engineer specializing in data collocation; in other words, this place backs up and guards the security of corporate records. Given free rein over the vast amounts of equipment at the Farm, Carver has indulged all sorts of hobbies without his boss’s knowledge.

He can spy on fellow employees. He can move anonymously through chat rooms in search of victims who meet his precise physical specifications. And he can really mess with Jack McEvoy once his system of traps reveals that The Times has been conducting computer searches trying to ferret out creepy, fetishistic trunk killers like the Scarecrow himself.

“The Scarecrow,” a return to form for Mr. Connelly and his sharpest book since “The Lincoln Lawyer,” pivots energetically among its subplots, often returning affectionately to the newspaper world. Jack, the shaggy veteran, has been given a pretty young female protégé (much as Russell Crowe has in the current film “State of Play”) who represents everything that’s wrong with newfangled journalistic practices. Her name is Angela Cook, and she is what Jack calls a mojo, “a mobile journalist nimbly able to file from the field by any electronic means.” As Jack says mournfully about her approach: “It was about filing stories on your phone instead of using it to call rewrite. The morning paper might as well be called The Daily Afterthought. Everything in it was posted on the Web the night before.”

Happily for “The Scarecrow” some things never go out of style. Those include collegial back-stabbing, which is another of Angela’s talents, and the eagerness of news sources to hoodwink the press. While the book briefly wonders what would happen in a world of gullible newbie journalists, it spends most of its time demonstrating how Jack gets the job done right.

He is accompanied by the F.B.I. agent Rachel Walling, an old flame and one of Mr. Connelly’s long list of celebrity guest characters. “The Scarecrow” follows a yellow brick road from The Times to the Farm to wherever Jack and Rachel are rekindling their romance.

“The Scarecrow” begins its crime plot routinely, with more emphasis on the press than on the investigation. Then it gets jacked up to a high level of suspense by the Scarecrow’s sinister powers in the Internet’s darker reaches. And then it turns back into something familiar, as Mr. Connelly allows the long-range demands of his career to diminish this particular book’s ending.

The denouement is left incomplete so that this story can be revisited. And the last chapters aren’t treated as a sufficient closing. “The Scarecrow” ends with the opening pages of Mr. Connelly’s next book, “Nine Dragons,” starring Harry Bosch and scheduled to arrive a mere five months from now. It’s tantalizing to imagine what Mr. Connelly might accomplish if he ever took his time.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/books/21masl.html

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