The Poet

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For much of the book the guy was shoved around and bland, a dud with little to say -- to the point where I felt ticked off, and never "got" Rachel's interest in him, not remotely.

Previously in his FBI career, the friend worked on the famous case tracking the killer known as The Poet. Prior to having my child, I was, perhaps, somewhat of a “bleeding heart” liberal and a Christian in my views toward pedophiles: maybe they CAN be rehabilitated and cured of their sickness, and it is the judicial system’s and the church’s duty to try. As I watched my daughter grow it began to bother me that I had created a fictional world where a killer like Robert Backus could walk free. Just out the window and across the balcony I no longer see the Marlboro Man’s steely eyes watching from the billboard. This is less of a review than it is a sort of caveat to my rating—the caveat being that I listened to this book.

I missed out on Jack McEvoy when I discovered Michael Connelly a few years ago; concentrating on the excellent Harry Bosch series (rather than the "Harry Bosch Universe"). He was named "The Poet" because he left notes containing lines of poetry from the work of Edgar Allan Poe, at each murder scene, disguising the deaths as suicides. Jack is taken along on the operation to arrest Gladden, who kills one of the FBI agents, Rachel's ex-husband Gordon Thorson. Jack McEvoy is a reporter in pursuit of not only a story but the killer who murdered his twin brother, Sean. Michael Connelly breaks these rules in The Poet and in the follow-up novel, The Narrows by mixing the first and third person.

This book and character mesh with Michael Connley's Harry Bosch series, so fans of that series may want to give this one a try. Perhaps the thing dating this the most is the idea that The Rocky Mountain News editors’ biggest concern is that they’ll get scooped by another newspaper in the fast paced world of print journalism, and not that their entire industry will collapse and they’ll be out of business by 2009. I came to realize that the one place where I could control things was in the fictional universe that I had created. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. But I have come to realize that the line between reality and the created world of a novel is thinnest when it comes to human feelings and desires.Is he doing all this to avenge his brother, or is he simply hoping to find that Big Story, the one that may finally get him a Pullitzer Prize and a higher-paying job as a staff reporter for a newspaper like the Chicago Tribune or the Los Angeles Times? Una de las agentes, Rachel Walling, personaje habitual en las novelas de Michael Connelly, desempeña un papel fundamental en la investigación, aunque finalmente el asesino consiga escapar. Taboos succeed in creating an atmosphere in which feelings never get expressed and problems never get solved.