2009 "First Edition: May 2009" stated; Little, Brown and Company publishers, New York; larger hardbound with ebony boards and bronze lettering on spine; very good condition, appears unread; dust jacket very good.
Description -
The Scarecrow is a 2009 novel written by American author Michael Connelly. It was Connelly's 21st book (20th novel) and the second featuring as the main character Jack McEvoy, a reporter now living in Los Angeles, and FBI agent Rachel Walling. As a result, the novel is a sequel to the events in Connelly's 1996 book The Poet, although another Connelly novel, The Narrows, was published in 2004 as the "official" sequel to The Poet. The book was published in the UK and Ireland on May 12, 2009, and in the US and Canada on May 26, 2009.
Although McEvoy has made two subsequent appearances in Connelly's Harry Bosch novels (A Darkness More Than Night and The Brass Verdict), and Walling has appeared in three such novels (The Narrows, Echo Park and The Overlook), this was their first appearance together since The Poet.
Plot -
The story begins with Jack McEvoy's termination by the Los Angeles Times due to the newspaper's financial crisis. He is given two weeks to train his replacement, Angela Cook, on the "cop beat" and decides that he wants to write one more major story before his last day. Jack focuses on the case of 16-year-old drug dealer Alonzo Winslow, who confessed that he brutally raped one of his clients, then stuffed her body in the trunk with a plastic bag over her head, tied shut with a length of rope around her neck. Angela, a beautiful and ambitious young reporter, maneuvers to get herself a part of the story. However, after Jack is given access to the defense files, he learns that Alonzo only confessed to stealing the car containing the body, not to the rape-murder. In researching trunk murders on the Internet, Angela unwittingly finds evidence of a similar crime in Las Vegas. However, Angela's research also took her to a "trap" site set up by the real murderer: Wesley Carver, an MIT graduate who is the chief security officer of a "server farm" (colocation and backup services) near Phoenix, referred to by everyone as the "scarecrow" of the farm. Carver cracks her e-mail password at the Times and learns that Jack is headed to Vegas. He promptly creates a fake data emergency so that his company will send him to L.A.
The next day, Jack finds that none of his credit cards nor his cell phone work, so he buys a throwaway phone. He shows the evidence of the identical L.A. murder to the attorney for the convicted Vegas murderer, who gives Jack a letter permitting him to meet his client, imprisoned in a remote location in Nevada. During the lengthy drive on the "loneliest road in America", Jack calls FBI agent Rachel Walling, his former girlfriend...