Story-chaser on back foot

A bit slow to start, The Scarecrow tells the story of an almost washed-up crime reporter, Jack McEvoy, who has just 30 days left in his job after a series of cuts in the newsroom. Forced to train in his replacement, the young and ambitious Angela Cook who is willing to work for peanuts, he gets the faint whiff of a last story that just might net him the Pulitzer Prize – and show his editor just what an old hack can turn out.

He starts to investigate the story behind a 16-year-old black teenager’s confession to the murder of white woman in the projects. The confession is of course bogus and he starts to look behind the circumstances surrounding the death of the young woman. She was found bound in the boot of her car with a plastic bag tied around her neck. An internet search quickly reveals this is not the first such ‘truck murder,’ but the internet trawl also springs a trap set by the serial killer alerting him to the fact that the journalist who helped capture another serial killer, The Poet, is now on his trail too.

The book shows just how easy it is for hackers to invade your life via your computer. He uses his computer not only to track his victims but also immobilise them. He hacks into the newsroom computer system and tracks Jack’s emails so he can see how close he is to catching him. He stops his credit cards, crashes his bank accounts and uses any transactions to track his every move. Only a phone call to his old flame, FBI agent Rachel Walling, manages to save his life. But the Scarecrow has a whole host of other delights planned for him which sees him accused of murdering his eager replacement and leaving his work reputation in tatters. As for his Pulitzer Prize, when he does get around to having enough evidence to go public with the story, he has become one of the key players in it and instead has to be interviewed by one of his colleagues who gets all the front-page glory.

There are twists, turns and dead bodies throughout to keep it fast-paced and interesting, and Connelly injects the story with a variety of human emotions which turn it into something more than a mere thriller. Jack remains under the constant threat of redundancy – a ticking clock that puts him under pressure and undermines his ideas as people believe he is just trying to string out his employment or make himself out to be more important in a bid to keep his job.

As the story hots up on the front pages, albeit under his colleague’s byline, we see the cynical manoeuvres of his bosses to try to retain him for a few extra months to ensure the paper remains at the forefront of the story gripping the country: a serial killer who has operated for years under the radar of the police framing others for his crimes and a reporter’s investigation which has seen two men released for murders they did not commit. The final piecing together of all the different strands of the story works very well and even the rekindled romance between Jack and Rachel fails to dampen the telling of this story. Will Jack ever get to write that one book that all journalists believe they have in them? Just have to find out yourself.