His last assignment? Training his replacement, a low-cost reporter just out of J-school. Forced to take a buy-out from the Los Angeles Times, he's got 30 days left on the job. Jack McEvoy is at the end of the line as a crime reporter. The Scarecrow Jack McEvoy returns with a story he just can't let go of. Now Harry Bosch is heading straight into the path of the most ruthless and inventive murderer he has ever encountered. This fact alone makes elements of his death doubly suspicious. Previously in his FBI career, the friend worked on the famous case tracking the killer known as The Poet. He gets a call, too, from the widow of a friend who died recently. Harry Bosch is adjusting to life in Las Vegas as a private investigator and a new father.

Former FBI agent Rachel Walling is working a dead-end stint in South Dakota when she gets the call she's been dreading for four years. Private investigator Harry Bosch confronts a villain who's long been in hiding - a fiend known as The Poet. An investigation that looks like the story of a lifetime might also be Jack's ticket to a lonely end.

More frightening still, the killer appears to know that Jack is getting nearer and nearer. Not only that, but they all leave suicide notes drawn from the poems of writer Edgar Allan Poe in their wake. Surprise at the circumstances of his brother's death prompts Jack to look into a whole series of police suicides, and puts him on the trail of a cop killer whose victims are selected all too carefully. The apparent suicide of his policeman brother sets Denver crime reporter Jack McEvoy on edge. 'The pre-eminent detective novelist of his generation' Ian Rankin The Poet Meet the cunning, poetry-quoting serial killer of unprecedented savagery executing one homicide cop after another.

The poet connelly