Continuity Nod: As appropriate to Connelly's heavily populated universe.

Cigarette of Anxiety: Hank the kitchen man has to start puffing on a smoke after a murderer barrels through the kitchen and Jack rescues a hog-tied Rachel from a room service cart.

Denslow, the illustrator of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. And the murderer's website, Denslow Data, turns out to be a Shout-Out to W.W. This eventually leads Jack to figure out the 'scarecrow' connection to the murders.

Chekhov's Gun: One of Jack's co-workers has a picture from The Wizard of Oz hanging on her wall.

And I Must Scream: After being shot through the head, Carver is left in an irreversible coma, suffering from terrible pain, trapped in his own mind and unable to communicate.No connection with the villain from the Batman universe, or with the 1920 film by Buster Keaton. Jack's investigation of the murder soon leads to a completely different direction, eventually taking him to a computer 'server farm' in Arizona, run by a computer tech named Wesley Carver, who has some dark secrets.įollowed 11 years later by a third Jack McEvoy novel, Fair Warning. Jack fields a call from the grandmother of Alonso Winslow, a gangbanger being held on a murder charge involving a stripper found dead in the trunk of a car. And to make matters worse, the relentless decline of the newspaper industry has resulted in Jack being fired from the Times, but not before he has to train his replacement, fresh-faced young reporter Angela Cook.

He has not seen Rachel Walling, the FBI agent he fell in love with while chasing The Poet. He was hired to a hefty salary by the Los Angeles Times but in the thirteen years since he has not written any other books, with an unfinished and failed novel sitting in a drawer. Life has been something of a disappointment for Jack since he hit the big time with his true crime book The Poet. The novel revisits Jack McEvoy, crime reporter and hero of previous Connelly novel The Poet. The Scarecrow is a 2009 crime novel written by Michael Connelly.

The poet and the scarecrow