The Poet By Michael Connelly

I have a few Michael Connelly books in my collection but I have not read any of them.  A friend lent me “The Poet” by Michael Connelly several weeks ago and I managed to finish reading it (480 pages) within 2 days.

The Poet by Michael Connelly

In The Poet, the hero is Jack McEvoy, a Rocky Mountain News crime-beat reporter. The Poet opens with the apparent suicide of Jack’s twin brother, Sean, a Denver homicide detective. Sean had been severely depressed over his failure to solve the gruesome murder of an attractive college girl. Jack finds it hard to believe that his brother would do such a thing, but the evidence seems overwhelming, and he ultimately accepts it.

Jack decides to do an article on his brother’s death and begins to do his research and investigation. Upon discovering that a number of other homicide detectives across the country have apparently committed suicide in ways similar to his brother, Jack begins to have second thoughts about his brother’s suicide.  He soon suspects that a serial murderer is at work—a killer who’s left a trail of short ‘suicide notes’ drawn from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. It’s the story of a lifetime—except that ‘the Poet’ already seems to know that Jack is trailing him.

Jack realizes a pattern to the killings: it involves brutal murders of seemingly unrelated victims and then the executions (camouflaged as suicides) of the chief investigating police officers. Armed with what he’s dug up, Jack heads off to Washington, to the Law Enforcement Foundation and the FBI.

As his information reopens cases, Jack trades his silence for an inside role in the investigation and the hunt for the perpetrator who becomes known as The Poet. Along the way, Jack becomes involved with a beautiful FBI agent named Rachel Walling.

The investigation finally zooms in on a paedophile known as William Gladden. When Gladden is killed, I thought the story is about to end but when I saw that there is still 80 over pages before the book ends, I knew that the author has more twists up his sleeves and I was right.

This is a very well-orchestrated thriller that grabs you by the scuff of your neck and never let go. I have become a fan of Michael Connelly!