The Poet, winner of the Dilys Award, is a riveting mystery novel by the acclaimed author Michael Connelly.
It is told from the first-person perspective of Jack McEvoy, a crime reporter who finds out his brother Sean has been killed. A homicide detective, Sean is made to look like he committed suicide, the evidence a one lined note quoting Edgar Allen Poe. It is from Poe's name where the title of the novel, and the name of the murderer comes. Suspecting this is a faked suicide, McEvoy begins his own journey investigating circumstances around his brother's murder.
Soon, a series of similar cases with dead homicide detectives leaving apparent suicide notes with quotations of Poe focus McEvoy's attention. He begins to piece together that a serial killer is involved. The FBI joins the investigation as it opens up, and a romance between McEvoy and another detective ensues. Intrigue upon intrigue are layered and McEvoy finds himself in dire straits with those he suspects of being more than what they seem.
Michael Connelly, who has been awarded every possible award for mystery writers, is author of multiple works of crime fiction and detective novels. He is also the author of The Lincoln Lawyers, which was adapted into a film starring Matthew McConaughey. All of his novels appear in the same fictional universe and there are multiple character crossovers among the novels. It was his obsession with Raymond Chandler's detective stories that inspired him to write, and he would later rent for several years Chandler's former apartment. His early writing career was spent as a journalist, one story for which he was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Covering the crime beat in Florida and L.A., he kept his job as a journalist until his fourth novel was published, after which he quit to write full time.
"This book was eerily creepy and engaging. Despite the subject matter of the story, I was enthralled from the get-go and couldn't put the book down when I got to the last 200 pages. The only downfalls were that I read The Lincoln Lawyer first which was a much better book in my opinion, and that I thought there should have been more on the ending than was there."
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Nikki (4 out of 5 stars)