The Poet

January 1, 1996
In a departure from his crime novels featuring LAPD's Harry Bosch, Connelly (The Last Coyote) sets Denver journalist Jack McEvoy on an intricate case where age-old evils come to flower within Internet technology. Jack's twin brother, Sean, a Denver homicide detective obsessed with the mutilation murder of a young woman, is discovered in his car, dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot, with a cryptic note written on the windshield. Jack's investigation uncovers a series of cop suicides across the country, all of which have in common both the cops' deep concerns over recent cases and their last messages, which have been taken, he quickly determines, from the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. As his information reopens cases in Chicago, Baltimore, Dallas, New Mexico and Florida, Jack joins up with a team from the FBI's Behavioral Science Section, which includes sharp, attractive agent Rachel Walling. Connections between the dead cops, the cases they were working on and the FBI profile of a pedophile whom readers know as William Gladden occur at breakneck speed, as Jack and the team race to stay ahead of the media. Edgar-winning Connelly keeps a surprise up his sleeve until the very end of this authoritatively orchestrated thriller, when Jack finds himself in California, caught at the center of an intricate web woven from advanced computer technology and more elemental drives.

September 15, 1995
Edgar Award winner Connelly deserts popular series detective Harry Bosch for a new hero: crime reporter Jack MacElvoy, whose first case involves the fishy suicide of his detective brother.

October 1, 1995
Crime reporter Jack McEvoy knows cops commit suicide, but he can't accept that his twin brother, Sean, the Denver police department's top homicide cop, would eat his gun--even if he was depressed and obsessed by a grisly unsolved murder. To understand what happened to his brother, Jack begins to investigate police suicides and discovers what appears to be the work of a peripatetic serial cop killer who somehow gets his tough victims to leave suicide notes drawn from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. It's a great news story for Jack and offers a kind of vindication for Sean. It also gives Jack entree to a high-powered FBI manhunt for the killer dubbed "the Poet." Connelly, whose Harry Bosch novels have already won him a devoted audience of mystery and cop-novel fans, should hit it big this time and reach the large audience who gleefully subjected themselves to the horrors of Thomas Harris' "Red Dragon" and "Silence of the Lambs." Although not quite as gut-wrenchingly harrowing as those books, "The Poet" is a skillfully told and riveting tale. Clearly a must for all public libraries. ((Reviewed Oct. 1, 1995))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1995, American Library Association.)