But nothing prepares him for the death of his brother - a Denver homicide detective, haunted by a case he was unable to solve - who evidently turned his gun on himself in the backseat of his car. Jack McEvoy is the crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News. He has seen death in all of its forms. I have a morbid fascination with the evil that men do - the “everyman” - rather than organised, methodical killers with an insatiable appetite for murder. My favourite crime novels deal with “smaller,” less grandiose murders. But I often find serial killer stories luxuriate in the depravity and gruesomeness of the violence, and lose any semblance of realism as the killer hunts their prey and evades capture through theatrics, slowly getting under the skin of their pursuer(s), driving them mad, until the grand denouement. I understand their popularity the cat-and-mouse game of predator/prey has been fodder for great stories for eons. When they’re done well - Meg Gardiner’s UNSUB, for example - they’re brilliantly pulse-pounding and terrifying, laden with tension and byzantine twists and turns. Mysteries about serial killers are my least favourite type of crime novel. In fact, it’s even better than I remember.

On the eve of the publication of the third Jack McEvoy novel Fair Warning - amid my re-read of every book Michael Connelly has published - I went back to where it all started for the intrepid newspaperman: 1996’s The Poet.

The Poet by Michael Connelly