Alaska Employment Law

Michael Connelly, The Scarecrow – I never get sick of Michael Connelly, who writes crime books that are like Lay’s®:  betcha you can’t read just one.  The Scarecrow, his newest, features a return visit from L.A. Times crime reporter Jack McEvoy (previously featured in The Poet). 

McEvoy is about to be laid off from the West Coast’s biggest paper as both the recession (yeah, the one we’re in) and the Internet squeeze news publishing hard.  On his way out the door, McEvoy decides to follow up on a call he receives from a woman from the projects, who claims that the police are framing her 16-year-old “son” for the proverbial murder that he did not commit.  And when McEvoy looks into it, the pieces don’t fit.  The trail leads eventually to a company that runs a data storage center, or “server farm,” in Arizona that provides security primarily for law firms and their web sites.  The man who runs the farm is awfully good at mining data for his own purposes, let’s just leave it at that. 

Connelly’s books are page turners with very strong characters, and this one is no exception.  (FBI Agent Rachel Walling, featured in some of Connelly’s Harry Bosch books, makes a return appearance as well.)  Full of mordant humor about the passing of the newspaper era, The Scarecrow was worth the price of admission:  $9.99 on Kindle.  It’s a good summer read.