THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 24, 1996 TAG: 9603210591
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY GEORGE HEBERT
LENGTH: Medium: 73 lines
THE POET
MICHAEL CONNELLY
Little, Brown. 435 pp. $22.95.
Far-fetched plots abound in the world of mystery novels. They're a challenging part of the game for those many reader/addicts who treat them primarily as puzzles to be solved - or not solved, perhaps, until the last word of the last chapter. The more complicated and the less reflective of ordinary crime, the better.
Such readers will find few more far-fetched, or more zestfully inventive, yarns than the latest from Michael Connelly. At the same time, his new book, The Poet, is, in some ways, incredibly and even scarily realistic.
In this story, the serial killings and child-molestation trails that frustrate investigators - including reporter Jack McEvoy - mirror some ugly realities of our time.
Connelly, author of four previous thrillers, equips his characters with laptops, faxes, cellular phones and other electronic tools of the day. We even follow McEvoy, police and the FBI along the myriad computer-linked passageways of the Internet, where fictional pornographers find each other - and their victims - just as we read in today's papers.
McEvoy, the teller of much of the tale, finds himself plunged into a snarl of questions and horrors when his twin, Sean, a homicide detective in Denver, is found dead of a gunshot wound. Gunpowder residue and Sean's known despondency over an unsolved mutilation murder point to suicide. But the reporter senses some kind of set-up.
His suspicions are further inflamed when he finds that a purported suicide note, written on the fogged windshield of the car in which Sean was killed, reads more like a metaphysical riddle than a farewell from a feet-on-the-ground cop. The words: ``Out of space. Out of time.''
When McEvoy starts digging into other cases in which policemen had apparently taken their own lives, he finds a few curious parallels.
He also learns that there has been a national study of the phenomenon. Early on he stumbles onto a policeman's death where a last message also had a spooky literary ring.
With a little luck and logic, he soon has Edgar Allan Poe identified as the source. Then evidence begins to build - with the FBI getting into the case, too - that some maniac with a penchant for pornography and a hate for homicide investigators seems to have left a path of grisly murders, with Poe quotations as linking signatures. An I-dare-you-to-catch-me thing. The investigators dub their quarry ``The Poet.''
This gives the story a thread of the dark and eerie for those who like mysteries that way.
There are also a skein of romance - McEvoy and a female FBI agent become a twosome - and more surprise twists than in one of John Le Carre's spy constructions.
Other items on the mind-taxing side are the use of hypnosis in the murders of the policemen and, as the chief boggler of the imagination, the basic story line: A series of double killings - each consisting of a ``bait'' killing and the follow-up slaying of a detective.
Deep into the man-(or woman-) hunt, the FBI gets a fax that taunts the investigators with accurate information about the murders and promises that another target is about to be hit.
This leads to a stakeout to catch the lunatic plus a couple of shoot-outs plus a couple of additional plot twists.
All lively reading but all quite a stretch. MEMO: George Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. He lives in
Norfolk. by CNB