On May 26th, a surprise arrived via my Kindle. I had completely forgotten that I had pre-purchased Michael Connelly’s new novel, Fair Warning, to be delivered as soon as it was published, and suddenly there it was! I had another book mid-read, so I have just finished it.

Connelly leaves the world of Harry Bosch to hark back to gonzo journalist Jack McEvoy, the protagonist of two of his former books, The Poet and The Scarecrow. Although I read both of those books when they came out (I have to date read 34 of Connelly’s books!), it’s been such a long time that I toyed with the idea of revisiting them first before proceeding with the new one, but chose to forge ahead. Although there were a few references to the previous cases in this one, it essentially read like a stand-alone for those who hadn’t read them, so that was fine.

As well as being the title of the book, Fair Warning is the name of a non-profit consumer protection news website run by Myron Levin (which actually exists in real life). Jack is a reporter for this website, which feels like something of a come-down from his former hard-hitting crime beat for the L.A. Times (and his authorship of two best-selling books), but he is quick to point out that consumer reporting is a vital service to the public, especially in this age of accelerating scientific discovery, and that many major papers (the L.A. Times and others) pick up and run with his stories. Maybe he protests too much?

The beginning of this story, however, isn’t professional, it’s personal: Two homicide detectives show up at McEvoy’s door with the news that Tina Portrero, a woman with whom he had a fun, slightly drunken one-night stand (a year previous) has been brutally murdered, and he is a suspect. Jack cooperates to the extent that he provides a DNA sample in order to eliminate himself from their list of “people of interest”; but then, because of a curious mind and an eye for the anomalous detail, McEvoy gets ahead of the detectives on this crime and a bunch of related ones.

The method of the murder (which I won’t mention here) is so dramatic and so extreme that McEvoy researches it, and discovers that this method appears in widespread cases; then he notices that the murderer may have been using personal data shared by the victims themselves in a particular way, to select and hunt his targets.

At this point, McEvoy has ceased to think of himself as an accused murderer and started to see the potential for a really big story that involves solving the murders of a bunch of women, zeroing in on a serial killer, and even calling the government to account for lax practices in data protection. So he decides to reach out to his former lover, Rachel Walling, whose FBI profiling career he burned the last time they collaborated, to see if she can pull some strings for him.

Instead, Rachel jumps into the middle of his quest, perhaps to curry favor with and return to the FBI fold, helping Jack’s information stream but also setting up all kinds of conflicts of interest.

A big part of the story here is the moral quandaries in which the various characters find themselves. McEvoy does want to identify the killer and facilitate his capture; but he also wants to break his story, which means he can’t hand over all his information to the police until he “gets the scoop.” He and Rachel Walling have a chemistry between them that didn’t disappear with their falling-out years ago, so there is a motivation to perhaps rekindle that. In addition, Walling has been pursuing a necessary but boring job since she left the FBI, so the prospect of handing them a serial killer ignites her with the ambition to prove them wrong for firing her. A colleague of Jack’s at the website, who is added to the story by his editor, wants to make a name for herself without treading on Jack’s toes too much to do so; and Jack realizes that although he is the better researcher, she is the better writer, so he reluctantly acquiesces in her involvement but then keeps throwing her under the bus. And of course the police want to be the first, last, and final arbiters of what happens with this case, story scoop be damned. It makes for an interesting level of tension throughout the story.

Connelly has pulled off a gripping, fast-paced tale whose interest level is enhanced by having a reporter, rather than a detective, at the helm. Some of the true-to-life details of data collection and (the lack of) government regulation are chilling, and he also fills in the reader on some aspects of operating on the dark web, as well as providing the usual details of his Los Angeles setting that are fun for those of us who live here and recognize them. I enjoyed this book, and it was a nice change from the Bosch litany.

And no, I have no idea why there is a black bird (a crow? a raven?) on the cover.