The Poet

Jack McEvoy learns that his twin brother Sean has committed suicide.  He finds this difficult to accept though all the evidence makes any other conclusion seem impossible.  His brother was a Denver PD homicide detective who had been working on the gruesome murder of Theresa Lofton, a college student.  As a crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News, Jack had tried to get his brother to tell him about the case but he had refused.  Now that Sean was dead, he was more determined to find out about the murder that drove his brother to suicide.  His efforts led him to doubt his brother committed suicide and he soon convinced the Denver PD to reopen the case.  Searching for other cops who had committed suicide, he travelled to Chicago and found a similar combination of a homicide detective who committed suicide while investigating a gruesome murder.  Chicago PD also reopened that case.  On to Washington DC to get information from a study of police suicides.  By now, he has attracted the attention of the FBI who try to get him to shelve the story while they hunt for a serial killer who disguises his murders as suicides.  Thanks to suicide notes that turned out to be excerpts from Edgar Allan Poe, the killer is dubbed The Poet.

 

The story is mostly told in the first-person from Jack's point of view.  This often proves to be annoying since Jack is not a very likable character.  Though he has a talent for digging up the story and making connections, he comes across as whiner.  When he gets involved with FBI Agent Rachel Walling, he becomes near intolerable.  When he's with her it's puppy love and when she is absent, he is disconsolate and thinks she has left him.  Ugh.  That she hopped in the sack with this guy only a day after meeting him doesn't speak too highly of her.

 

The book switches to third person when following other characters which was odd.  I wonder if Connelly had written the book in the first person and afterwards decided that he needed to detail the most recent crimes of the quarry to make the confrontation between them have more payoff.  Yes, had the Gladden parts been left out, the encounter between them would have seemed very odd.

 

The story is quite good but the protagonist is hard to like.  I think I would have liked it better if he had been written in the third person.  It is interesting that the book concludes in Los Angeles and Jack even went to Hollywood Homicide to meet with a detective.  I almost expected to see Harry Bosch sitting there.  Nope.  At least, not yet.