Real page turner ( )

If you have the edition that has the foreward by Stephen King--just skip that part. I almost didn't read this book because King touted it as being so frightening that he had to turn on more lights in his house while he was reading it. So I'm thinking this is as intense, if not more so, than King's The Shining. I seriously kept picking up, but not starting it because I didn't want the crap scared out of me. So when I started reading, after about a third of the book I was just plain pissed because this was not scary at all.

The subject matter could be construed as 'scary' in reference to who is actually doing the evil deeds, but not scary enough to keep you awake at night or looking over your shoulder :)

This is the one Connelly book that I really just didn't care for. A bit Patterson in presentation and a subject and plot that really didn't have much imagination to it. If you want to see what happens next to Jack McEvoy, he makes a brief appearance in A Darkness More Than Night. ( )

I am a big fan of Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch character, and so I was interested to try out one of his other creations. The story of 'The Poet', an apparent serial killer and the newspaper reporter Jack McEvoy was fast paced and had a couple of good twists at the end. A couple of the 'love interest' scenes were a bit hammy, but overall, a good detective thriller on par with Connelly's best ( )

Not being familiar with the quality of conventional thrillers, I’m in no position to judge the merits of this book in relation to its competition. It’s certainly not highbrow literature, but it admirably delivers the sort of humorless charm that one might reasonably expect from a bestseller. Plot is clearly the driving force of the novel, and Connelly keeps it that way by avoiding indulgences such as tangential mood-setting or extraneous emotional décor. This bracing minimalism helps maintain dramatic tension, but it does so at the expense of a richer reading experience. I many ways, “The Poet” is similar to the hour-long police procedurals we’re so used to seeing on television: a guilty-pleasure... a vaguely formulaic diversion that is satisfying without being particularly fulfilling. I might very well pick up another Connelly bestseller the next time I want to numb my mind at the beach while soaking up some sun.

On a side note, it’s interesting to read “The Poet” from a historical perspective. It takes place at the dawn of the Internet age, when digital cameras were expensive novelties, cellular phones were confined to automobiles, and the Internet was taking baby-steps through cumbersome and noisy dial-up modems. ( )

I read a review of Connelly's new book, The Scarecrow. It was a positive review, and I found a few other good reviews. I thought I would like to find a pulp writer that I would enjoy. I put a hold on The Scarecrow and looked for another of his works to read before that became available. This book sounded good and uses the same main character as the newest one, a newspaper crime writer. So I got this out of the library at the same time. I enjoyed the story a lot. It really pulled me in and held my interest. I read it quickly, spending a lot of time with it over only a few days. Although the writing made me wince fairly often, with cliches and awkward prose, this did not happen too often to ruin my enjoyment of the plot. Another good point was that I was not able to find any serious unbelievability with the story line. ( )