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.