A serial killer murders women by internally decapitating them from behind earning him the name The Shrike after the bird who has a similar MO. When his latest vic turns out to be a recent one-night stand of reporter Jack McEvoy’s, making him a person of interest, Jack becomes involved in the murder investigation. Can Jack uncover who The Shrike is, find out why he’s doing what he’s doing and stop him before he kills again?
Michael Connelly’s previous Jack McEvoy novel The Scarecrow is still one of my favourite of his books but I wouldn’t say Fair Warning is as good as that one - though it’s better than The Poet, the first McEvoy book.
What really made The Scarecrow stand out was the killer whose identity was compelling and terrifying - I can still remember the character and I read that book nearly a decade ago! In comparison, The Shrike is a paper-thin villain that we never really get to know in the least.
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Even at the end Connelly fails to deliver anything noteworthy about the character, giving the reader a cop-out nothing in place of something. He’s an incel! As if that explains everything. It’s very unsatisfying. It doesn’t even make sense because he beds the victims before he kills them so he’s not involuntarily celibate - he has had sex and could have regular sex and a normal relationship if he wanted. So he’s voluntarily single? He just hates women - you could argue that also describes incels but their namesake simply doesn’t apply to The Shrike. See, there’s some interesting psychological territory Connelly could have explored if he’d tried a bit more. Also, that detail at the end - a damaged spine from probable childhood abuse - is just lazy shorthand.
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Not that any of the characters are that memorable, especially the main characters Jack McEvoy and Rachel Walling, who’re basically Connelly’s stock capable professionals that appear in all of his books. About the only difference is that Jack will occasionally lose his cool and go off on one, like he does in the geneticist’s lab, which are rare exciting character moments.
But it’s also not a dull narrative either. Jack investigates at a breezy clip and the story develops well: we find out more about The Shrike’s victims, who he might be working with, other shady characters involved, Jack is always getting harassed either by the police or others, then the bodies start piling up.
Connelly writes it all in his usual competent, if sometimes long-winded, style. He’s skilful at putting across complex procedures and esoteric jargon in a way that doesn’t distract too much from the more compelling, lurid aspects of the story that most readers want to get to, as well as highlighting valid points like the lack of oversight and protection of personal data in the burgeoning field of consumer genetics.
The flipside of that is that the prose sometimes reads like Connelly’s talking down to a complete idiot, painstakingly explaining obvious acronyms after they appear in conversation (“44 YOA” = 44 years of age, AOD as Atlanto-Occipital Dislocation, the Shrike’s method of killing, mere paragraphs are having pasted a Wikipedia article on the cause of death!), having the main character frequently reminding you why they’re doing what they’re doing, all of which becomes tedious. Does his audience really have that short attention spans and struggle to follow a plot only slightly more complex than canned soup instructions?
The ending is also plain confusing and contrived.
SPOILER
The Shrike got away with it - why would he risk it all just to come back and kill McEvoy? His targets were women, not some reporter he barely knew and who couldn’t touch him. It didn’t make any sense and seemed only to be there so there could be a happy ending to the story - Jack beat the bad guy again, even if the bad guy didn’t need to return from Florida to California just to get killed. Stupid!
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Fair Warning is a fairly standard crime thriller by Michael Connelly’s slick standards that’s none too onerous to read either on a technical or story level. It has its flaws and it’s largely forgettable but it’s not bad either being by turns nearly gripping and thuddingly blah and settling for inoffensively agreeable most of the time. Still, if you haven’t read it, I recommend checking out The Scarecrow over this one instead.
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