The Scarecrow: A Michael Connelly Thriller

 

 

 

 

THE SCARECROW (2009)

By Michael Connelly

Little, Brown and Company, 2009, 419 pages.

★★★★

 

At first, I didn’t think The Scarecrow was up to par with other Michael Connelly crime thrillers, but the more pages I turned, the more I was engrossed. This “scarecrow” is similar to the farmer’s decoy only in the sense that its intent is to scare away threats to the “farm,” secret, anonymous, and (in theory) untraceable transactions on the dark web. You can assume that most of those activities are illegal: selling weapons, looting accounts, spreading malware, running prostitution rings, payments for assassinations, and moving drugs. The sites are often called “onion routing” as they work by encrypting multiple layers of the web as if each was an onion peel. The scarecrow in this novel nefarious tech genius/serial killer who constructs those layers* and makes the onion nearly impossible to peel.

 

The Scarecrow features journalist Jack McEvoy, whom readers know from Connelly’s novels The Poet  1996) and its sequel The Narrows (2004), perennial fan favorites. McEvoy’s (fictional) brother was among the Poet’s gruesomely murdered victims. Connelly puts a lot of himself into McEvoy in The Scarecrow. Connelly, like McEvoy, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Unlike McEvoy, Connelly left journalism before the Times began mass layoffs. Connelly often includes current events in his novels. Big city newspapers began losing readership in the 1980s, but 2009, the year The Scarecrow was published in the United States, was when major layoffs became front-page news.

 

Connelly pulled off a bold tactic in The Scarecrow in that we know the identities of two of the bad guys before we know anything else. McGinnis thinks he runs Western Data, a security “farm,” but Wesley Carver, his scarecrow in charge of the servers, is the real power. He’s a brilliant MIT grad, but also a nefarious murderer. Meanwhile back at the Times, word has come down that 100 employees are subject to a RIF (Reduction in Force) and Jack is number 99. He’s less upset than you might imagine; he’s burned out but needs the dough so he stays on for another two weeks to train his replacement, the vivacious Angela Cook. Angela is bright, but relatively inexperienced and willing to work for about a third of what Jack makes.

 

Jack plans to go out in glory. After printing an account of the arrest of Alonzo Winslow, a 16-year-old, for murder Jack is lambasted by the suspect's grandmother who claims that Alonzo stole the car in which a woman’s body was found but didn’t kill her. Although Alonzo is a foul-mouthed drug-dealer, Jack comes to suspect Alonzo, though a vile jerk, is not guilty and was browbeaten into a confession because he’s a young gang member (the Crips). If Jack can prove that, he can probably win another Pulitzer and write a book about racial injustice. He holds his cards close to his vest, but Angela tips him off to a dark web site about trunk murders with similar MOs involving braces, sexual assault, and strangulation. Little do either Angela or Jack know that the very act of viewing the site trips a “manwire” that allows Carver to trace them and seek to ruin and/or murder Jack.

 

Jack flies to Nevada to interview a trunk murderer imprisoned there, but finds his cellphone is compromised, his back account is empty, all his passwords have been stolen, his interview has been pushed back, and he doesn’t have enough money to drive his rental car back to LA. Trust me when I say that this is merely the tip of the iceberg for Jack. He does, however, manage to touch base with Rachel Walling, his former lover and an FBI agent. Some passion is rekindled; though a roll in the hay literally saves Jack’s life, it also gets Rachel fired.

 

The Scarecrow becomes a test of wits between individuals who break rules for differing reasons and when told to keep their hands out of the fire thrust them into the flames to see what will happen. There will be collateral damage. Connelly once again masterfully builds enough tension for nails to be bitten to the quick. Pity the poor crow that sits on Wesley Carver’s shoulder.

 

Rob Weir

 

* Good uses of the dark web include protecting journalist sources and communicating with those in the witness protection program.