The Poet (Jack McEvoy, #1; Harry Bosch Universe, #5)

by Michael Connelly

Death is my beat, Jack McEvoy writes, and we are immediately hooked and pulled in. It’s not a cheat-line, either, but one that perfectly sets the tone: dark, brooding, just plain scary.

The first thing you need to know about this novel is that it’s a marvelous and sustained piece of storytelling, an absolute joy to read if you like tales of suspense. The book is full of incident and stuffed with characters, many of them colorful; I counted twenty-eight “speaking parts” and know I didn’t even come close to getting them all. Still, you won’t get lost because Jack is almost always there, anchoring the tale, and “Death is [his] beat.” The second thing you need to know about The Poet is that it’s genuinely terrifying.

I do not use the word classic lightly, but I believe that The Poet may well prove to be one. Sometimes a novelist sends us a wonderful message between the lines: “I am capable of much more than I thought.” The Poet is that sort of book, long and rich, multilayered and satisfying. I wish you all the joy of finding out what lies beyond “Death is my beat.” Stephen King

I grieved now because I had not even known Sean was so close to the edge. He was Lite beer while all the other cops I knew were whiskey on the rocks. Of course, I also recognized how self-pitying this kind of grief was. The truth was that for a long time we hadn’t listened much to each other. We had taken different paths. And each time I acknowledged this truth the cycle of my grief would begin again.

What hooked me deepest was the message. The official police line was this: After my brother left the Stanley Hotel and drove up through Estes Park to Bear Lake, he parked his department car and for a while left the engine running, the heat on. When the heat had fogged the windshield he reached up and wrote his message there with a gloved finger. He wrote it backward so you could read it from outside the car. His last words to a world that included two parents, a wife and a twin brother. Out of space. Out of time.

“How come, Sean?” I asked out loud. “How come?” I realized what I was doing and looked around. I was the only one in the cemetery. The only one alive. I thought about what Riley had said about Sean not wanting anybody to get away. And I thought about how I didn’t even care about such things, as long as it made a good thirty-inch story. How had we separated so completely? My brother and I. My twin. I didn’t know. It just made me feel sad. Made me feel like maybe the wrong one was in the ground.

‘By a route obscure and lonely, / Haunted by ill angels only, / Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, / On a black throne reigns upright, / I have reached these lands but newly, / From an ultimate dim Thule—/ From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, / Out of SPACE—out of TIME.’ That’s it. But there is an editor’s note. It says an Eidolon means a phantom.”

I tentatively walked out on the frozen lake and looked down into one of these blue-black portals and imagined the depths below. I felt a slight tremor at my center. Twenty years earlier my sister had slipped through the ice and died in this lake. Now my brother had died in his car not fifty yards away.

As I reviewed the stories I looked for similarities to Lofton. There were few. She was a white female adult and he a black male child. As far different in terms of prey as would seem possible. But both were missing for more than twenty-four hours before being found and the mutilated bodies of both victims were found in city parks. Lastly, both had been at children’s centers on their last day. The boy at his school, the woman at the day care center where she worked. I didn’t know the significance of these connections but they were all I had.

“Just so we’re clear,” I said before he turned away, “if allowed into this as an observer, with two exceptions I will not write about the case until we have an arrest or you determine it is fruitless and focus your primary efforts on other cases.” “What are the exceptions?” Backus asked. “One is if you ask me to write about it. There may come a time that you’ll want to flush this guy out with a story. I’ll write it then. The other exception is if the story leaks. If this shows up in any other paper or on TV, all bets are off. Immediately. If I even get wind that somebody else is about to break it, I’ll break it myself first. This is my goddamn story.” Backus looked at me and nodded. “I won’t be long.” After he left, Walling looked at me and quietly said, “If that had been me, I would have called your bluff.” “That was no bluff,” I said. “That was for real.” “If that’s true, that you’d trade catching the guy who killed your brother for a story, then that makes me feel very sad for you. I’m going to get more coffee.” She got up then and left me. As I watched her walk back to the concession counter my mind wandered over what she had said and then came to rest on the lines by Poe that I had read the night before and that would not leave my memory. I dwelt alone In a world of moan And my soul was a stagnant tide

“Okay,” she said. “We have six dead detectives in six states. We also have six unsolved homicides that the detectives had been working individually at the time of their own death. The bottom line is we don’t feel comfortable yet making a firm commitment to whether we have one or two offenders out there—or possibly even more, though this seems unlikely. Our hunch, however, is that we are dealing with one but at the moment I don’t have a lot backing that up. What we do feel comfortable with is that the deaths of the six detectives are certainly linked and therefore most likely the work of one hand. For the moment our emphasis is on this offender. The one we are calling the Poet.

“First with the story, first with the glory. That’s an old newspaper saying. But it’s true. In most stories, the one that’s there first is always the one who gets the credit, even if the first story is full of holes and bullshit. Even if it’s a stolen story.”

Gladden didn’t mention names. But he did give the usual abuse excuse. Said that he was assaulted sexually as a child. Repeatedly. He was at the same age as the children he later victimized in Tampa. You see, that’s the cycle. It’s a pattern we often see. They become fixated on themselves at the point in their own lives when they were… ruined.”

Death is my beat. I have made my living from it and forged a professional reputation on it. I have profited by it. It has always been around me but never as close as those moments with Gladden and Backus, when it breathed right into my face, put its eye to mine and made a grab for me. I remember their eyes the most. I can’t sleep without first thinking of their eyes. Not for what was in them but for what was missing, what was not there. Behind them was only darkness. An empty despair so intriguing that I find myself fighting sleep to think about it sometimes. And when I think of them I can’t help but think of Sean as well. My twin. I wonder if he looked into the eyes of his killer at the end. I wonder if he saw what I saw. An evil as pure and as scarring as a flame. I still mourn for Sean. I always will. And I wonder as I watch and wait for the Eidolon when I’ll see that flame again.