Fair Warning

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I am a huge Michael Connelly fan. But with all the praise heaped upon his Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller series, and their high profile from their TV and film outings, it’s easy to forget sometimes that Connelly also writes other characters.
Fair Warning is the third solo outing for Jack McEvoy, the investigative reporter that first appeared in 1996’s The Poet, Connelly’s fifth book. He made a second appearance 2009’s The Scarecrow. There are no cameos by Bosch or Haller, but McEvoy’s long-time associate Rachel Walling plays a key role. She’s popped up in the occasional Bosch and Haller book (as has McEvoy), so the book is still part of the LA-based “Connelly-verse”.

The “Fair Warning” of the title refers to the online consumer rights website that McEvoy now works for, using his skills as an investigative journalist to uncover safety violations and scams. Previously, he’s built a track record for capturing killers, but the opening of this novel sees him being accused of being one himself, after a woman he went on a single date with turns up dead.

I’m not going to detail the plot anymore; I’ll leave that for you to enjoy. Suffice to say, the plotting is meticulous, with the pacing spot-on, and the premise ingenious and scarily prescient. Unlike most of Connelly’s novels. This is primarily told from a first-person point of view. I read a recent review of another author’s work, where the person claimed that they automatically gave such books one star. I will try to remain professional and merely say that not only is this one of the dumbest statements I have ever read, it also robs them of brilliant stories such as this. The first-person narrative gives an intimacy to the prose that would be missing in a third person telling, and works tremendously well.
As with all Connelly novels, he really gets under the skin of Los Angeles. I’ve never visited the city, yet through the eyes of Bosch, Haller and McEvoy, I feel as though I have walked its streets. The characters are well-drawn, and the villain is excellent.
Something worthy of note, without giving too much away, is how accurate the science in this book is.  This overlaps with my own field of expertise and not only is he technically correct, his use of the associated language is precise, yet comfortable. This can be rather difficult to pull off. The concepts dealt with can be hard for a non-specialist to render into meaningful prose. I confess to wincing whenever this is dealt with in fiction or on the screen; all too often writers throw a few appropriate phrases and words at the page and kind of hope they make enough sense to the casual reader to get their point across. To paraphrase Eric Morecombe “I am using all the correct vocabulary, but not necessarily in the correct order”. In Fair Warning he avoids this trap and any extrapolation that he does for story-telling purposes is seamless. All praise to his editors and beta readers.

This is another Connelly classic – which is in itself a recommendation – and the welcome return of one of his lesser-known characters.