Book: Michael Connelly's The Scarecrow
Dec. 12th, 2009 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
narcasseI'd pre-ordered a copy of The Scarecrow based entirely on a short write-up about it in the free men’s mag I picked up at the station one morning: that was back in May if the publishing date is anything to go by and I’ve been reading it on and off since then.
I was interested in the idea of it being a cybercrime novel mostly, though realistically it’s turned out to be a generic crime thriller with cybercrime elements. The main character after all is the obligatory grizzled older reporter whose sense of justice is far more laudable than the newfangled spinelessness that surrounds him. He’s a fairly stock character for this sort of thing though it’s an each way bet on whether the lead will be a reporter or a detective: they’re both old fashioned, believe in hard graft and are slowly being phrased out to make way for new and less decent ways to go about things as a general rule. This isn’t a bad thing: it’s a key element of guy-fi after all where it sometimes branches out into things like A Whiff of Death where the older hero is an academic who suddenly has to play the part of detective. This sort of character almost always has some kind of marriage issue, usually a divorce, behind them though in The Scarecrow the love interest that comes back isn’t actually the ex-wife. There’s a lot of background that I’m missing not having read any of his other books of which there seem to be quite a few that cover the background of Jack McEvoy and Rachel Walling, but the set pieces are familiar enough that I could just pick this up and start reading.
I’d really focused on the cybercrime angle when picking this up and while that had been the main appeal to me when it came to the details it was just a matter of extra detail. Early on I was amused at statements where the main character explicitly stated that he’d saved something as a Word doc but that didn’t actually go anywhere. There were some nice details such as the main criminal noting that people tended to be very carelessly when it came to passwords by picking obvious things or maintaining very easy uncovered online data. In fact the main criminal figured out one of his victim’s passwords by looking at her online blog which gave out way too much information about her daily life. A little disappointingly for me the reminder that plenty of people use things like their date of birth, a pet’s name or similar was about the extent of tech interest. There were other details where the pair of murderers had picked up information through a data farm but that was more general plot detail rather than a genuine IT issue.
Still, the story itself wasn’t bad and while generally predictable still allowed for enough suspension of disbelief that those issues could be overlooked in light of the rest of the details. The last revelation about the ‘signature’ of the murderer was something that I simply hadn’t made the connection about after all. The Scarecrow made for an enjoyable read before bed and certainly proved the point that it doesn’t always have to be a detective character doing the detective work, though that usually is the type I tend towards. I don’t know if I’d bother buying any other novels featuring Jack McEvoy but if I ever manage to get to my local library again or pick up a copy on bookmooch I wouldn’t mind reading The Poet just to fill in some of the background alluded to in this book.
I was interested in the idea of it being a cybercrime novel mostly, though realistically it’s turned out to be a generic crime thriller with cybercrime elements. The main character after all is the obligatory grizzled older reporter whose sense of justice is far more laudable than the newfangled spinelessness that surrounds him. He’s a fairly stock character for this sort of thing though it’s an each way bet on whether the lead will be a reporter or a detective: they’re both old fashioned, believe in hard graft and are slowly being phrased out to make way for new and less decent ways to go about things as a general rule. This isn’t a bad thing: it’s a key element of guy-fi after all where it sometimes branches out into things like A Whiff of Death where the older hero is an academic who suddenly has to play the part of detective. This sort of character almost always has some kind of marriage issue, usually a divorce, behind them though in The Scarecrow the love interest that comes back isn’t actually the ex-wife. There’s a lot of background that I’m missing not having read any of his other books of which there seem to be quite a few that cover the background of Jack McEvoy and Rachel Walling, but the set pieces are familiar enough that I could just pick this up and start reading.
I’d really focused on the cybercrime angle when picking this up and while that had been the main appeal to me when it came to the details it was just a matter of extra detail. Early on I was amused at statements where the main character explicitly stated that he’d saved something as a Word doc but that didn’t actually go anywhere. There were some nice details such as the main criminal noting that people tended to be very carelessly when it came to passwords by picking obvious things or maintaining very easy uncovered online data. In fact the main criminal figured out one of his victim’s passwords by looking at her online blog which gave out way too much information about her daily life. A little disappointingly for me the reminder that plenty of people use things like their date of birth, a pet’s name or similar was about the extent of tech interest. There were other details where the pair of murderers had picked up information through a data farm but that was more general plot detail rather than a genuine IT issue.
Still, the story itself wasn’t bad and while generally predictable still allowed for enough suspension of disbelief that those issues could be overlooked in light of the rest of the details. The last revelation about the ‘signature’ of the murderer was something that I simply hadn’t made the connection about after all. The Scarecrow made for an enjoyable read before bed and certainly proved the point that it doesn’t always have to be a detective character doing the detective work, though that usually is the type I tend towards. I don’t know if I’d bother buying any other novels featuring Jack McEvoy but if I ever manage to get to my local library again or pick up a copy on bookmooch I wouldn’t mind reading The Poet just to fill in some of the background alluded to in this book.
