Fair Warning

By Michael Connelly, Little, Brown and Company, 2020, 412 pages
Reviewed by Ted Streuli, June 24, 2020

I’d like to read a bestseller about me. There’s no character easier to empathize with and certainly no one in whom I have greater interest. So when Michael Connelly publishes a mystery about a journalist who has been downsized out of the LA Times and found his way to a non-profit investigative news website, it’s a little hard for me to take a pass.

“Fair Warning” is the third book in Connelly’s Jack McEvoy series, which started with “The Poet.” In the series debut, McEvoy was a crime reporter at the LA Times, but his career moved to an alt weekly in the second book, “The Scarecrow.” Predictably, if you know anything about the lives of print journalists in the past decade, we now find McEvoy at a consumer watchdog site, fairwarning.org, run by Myron Levin, a modern-day Perry White.

Connelly has made his fortune with the LAPD detective Harry Bosch series and supplemented it handsomely with Mickey Haller, the Lincoln lawyer. Now that we have an investigative reporter in the library, a hard-boiled private eye can’t be far behind. He’ll be welcome; McEvoy has neither Bosch’s edge nor Haller’s intellect, but Connelly always delivers page-turner sleuthing that’s fun to read.

“Fair Warning” follows the pattern. McEvoy is pursuing a serial killer against the wishes of the LAPD and his editor. They come around in the end, thanks in part to former FBI agent and on-again, off-again love interest, Rachel Waller. The killer, known as the Shrike because of his preference for violently breaking his victim’s necks, identifies his prey through a privacy leak in the booming DNA testing industry.

The consumer DNA labs won’t like “Fair Warning” because it exposes the frightening lack of oversight coupled with the astonishing ease of misuse that permeates the business.

Non-profit journalism organizations are going to love it, though. Connelly reminds readers why journalism matters and is a realist in his depiction of the industry’s evolution. He should know; Connelly was a crime reporter for the LA Times until his novels gained enough popularity to support him, and Myron Levin was one of his colleagues. Levin now runs Fair Warning, and while Jack McEvoy is made-up, the organization, its mission and Levin, its founder, are quite real and Connelly is on the board of directors.

The quest to catch the bad guy drives the book, and because it’s Connelly doing Connelly, it’s a quick, fun read. Journalists will appreciate the more subtle message about their craft and will close the book hoping all the non-journalists who read it will get the message too.