Customer Reviews

The Poet

5 star:		(164)
4 star:		(95)
3 star:		(40)
2 star:		(27)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

This was my first Connelly book, and safe to say I'm totally hooked.
From reading about his other books, this is one of his non-Bosch books, and as such, was a fortunate place to begin.

What we have here is an old-fashioned page turner. A bare bones summary would be a Denver reporter loses his twin brother cop to suicide, purportedly over a particularly disturbing, unsolved homicide. As he copes, the reporter learns about a number of police suicides, with several seeming related.

At that point in the novel, it becomes a struggle to put the book down. I had to remind myself to slow my reading so I wouldn't miss anything, yet I was tearing through the pages as fast as I could. You won't want to be bothered by anything else for a few hours.

The manhunt is breathlessly told, and becomes scarier as you peek into the mind of the perpetrator. Comparisons to "Silence of The Lambs" are understandable, but unfair. Honestly, this book isn't as good as THAT one, but it doesn't miss by much. Lector is nothing like the Poet; they're two different animals.

The final quarter of the book is best read at night, or better yet, like 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning, with only a lamp illuminating the page. It's a bit thrilling when the pieces fit together so unexpectedly yet neatly. There's a satisfying click to each piece of the puzzle as it fits into place.

Here's my big problem: the paperback edition I read ends with a several-page peek at his recent book, "The Narrows." If I'm not mistaken, characters from this book make it into that one, but somehow dovetails with his other books, of which there hae been seven or eight in between.

My problem then is that I have one heck of a lot of reading to do...

A friend recommended Michael Connelly when I said I hadn't read a really good thriller since Riptide by Preston and Child. I got the Poet the next day, and I read it in three big gulps. There are many parts of the book where it is simply impossible to stop reading.

I'll stay away from the plot(and I recommend you stay away from reviews that tell you too much), but it involves a likeable narrator, the FBI profilers, a truly creepy villain, and many plot twists that still make sense after you catch your breath.

If you are looking for a thriller, and you don't have to get to sleep soon, then this book is certainly for you. I plan to read all of the Michael Connelly books this summer, and that's the highest praise I can give an author.

A reporter, Jack McEvoy, looks into the death of his twin brother, a homicide detective who is found dead in his vehicle, an apparent suicide. Doubting the facts, he investigates the circumstances of his brother's death and uncovers cases of assumed suicides of other officers, with one commonality, a suicide note that apparently is a line from a poem. This opens an official investigation for a serial killer dubbed "The Poet."

This book may not grab you right off the bat, but after you get into it, you keep turning those pages longer than you intended to. If you like details of crime investigations you will like this book. The main character, Jack, is not a super-hero, but a believable and likeable good guy, who's persistence and determination one has to admire.

The pedophile personality in the book is very disturbing, and the murders descriptive, so it is not for the squeamish reader. I liked the fact that the book keeps you wondering as to who the real cop-killer is. The only disappointment was in the killers motivation - when the real killer is revealed, it is unclear what caused the individual to go wrong and created such an evil, warped personality. Recommend it for lovers of suspense and crime-solving - Intense, fast reading!

The Poet is not a bad book, not by a long shot, but likewise it is not a particularly good book. A first-person perspective story, we follow crime reporter Jack McEvoy's investigation into the apparent suicide of his homicide detective brother. The premise - a cop killer who makes it look like his victims committed suicide by leaving suicide notes comprised of lines from Edgar Allan Poe poems - is a very creative idea, as is the notion that the cop-killing serial killer is following another serial killer across the country without his knowledge and killing in tandem with him. The execution of the story, however, is decidedly lacking in both style and empathy, and towards the end you couldn't care less about who lives or dies.

The story begins suitably darkly...As a result, [McEvoy] is a difficult character to engage with, and as it is his story, it does not inspire us to rush onwards to the end. Furthermore, at various points we follow the first serial killer in a third-person perspective, which has a completely different style to McEvoy. Though this obviously displays talent on the part of Connolly, the sudden changes in tone disrupt the flow of the story, making it feel disjointed in places....Add to this a thoroughly unsatisfactory and inconclusive ending, and a far from believable twist on hypnosis, and the climax of the book does not sit well on the potential of the premise outlined above. It just feels like Connolly had a great outline for a novel, but [he failed in] making the ideas concrete...Perhaps it is only a personal criticism, but as a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, I found the usage of his poetry very painted on. Such an enigma surrounds the life and writings of Poe, his feelings, his manic-depression and periodic bouts of madness, that I thought much more could have been made of it, but instead the poems were used, it seemed, only because they were easily applicable to suicide notes. Also, dropping Edgar Allan Poe, master of darkness, into a story which is not all that dark, makes it feel misplaced. If the novel had maintained the darkness and poignancy of the opening few chapters it would have been much better, but as it stands it feels like Connolly is trying to emulate James Patterson and falling short. On ideas it is very good, but those ideas mutate as the story progresses into things which never really come to light, leaving you entirely unsatisfied. And one final criticism: what's wrong with a bunch of people hunting a killer? Why does the killer so often have to be one of the hunters? It has been done and double-done. Maybe traditional crime has just gone out of style.

The Poet! This book was really fun. While I am a fan of Connelly's Harry Bosch series, I was still able to fall for Jack McEvoy. I thought that Connelly's premise was very creative and great for bibliophiles.

The killer uses Poe's literary works as a basis for his murders. What a fabulous way for Connelly to merge his genius with the brilliance of Poe - one of the genre's greats.

I just could not put this one down. I found myself reading under the covers with my book light. A fun vacation from reality.

For 400 pages, I could not put this book down, then Connelly ruins it with a completely implausible, and ultimately dull ending. The narrator Jack, spends the book searching for the answers to his brother's apparent suicide. The ending gives us the who, but not the more important why or how

I have heard that a major key to writing well is to write what you know. In turn, as a murder-mystery writer you cannot write well about a crime scene unless you have actually stood outside the yellow tape and taken the situation in with all of your senses, or so the story would go. And that is the emphasis behind Michael Connelly's The Poet as I see it. Before becoming a best-selling author, Connelly wrote for newspapers, "primarily specializing in the crime beat" (MichaelConnelly.com). So before he wrote books, Connelly was a reporter. And instead of "typical" detective fiction, The Poet is about (what else?): a reporter.

I was immediately drawn to main character Jack McEvoy. He was sculpted with more precision. He was written with more passion. I may be way off base with this, but it seemed to me that McEvoy was a more natural character for Connelly to write. I have been to talks given by Michael Connelly where he shares experiences with police officers he was privileged to have, so you know there is truth in his detective fiction, but it was fun to read the same type of story wrapped in a different package. He had ridden along with the officers, but he had lived as a reporter. It was entertaining to get some insight into how reporters fight for information since they do not have the authority or the reputation with the police, and see just how competitive their world can be.

Yes, there is a girl. And right away I was closed minded to the whole thing. "This story did not need romantic involvement," I pleaded to the book in my hands, "it is so good without it." But I was wrong. Too often the romance is built in to make the book more marketable to a wider audience. Not so in The Poet.

I cannot remember the last time I came across a book that was so hard to put down. The Poet was interesting, entertaining and suspenseful. I found myself finishing the last page, closing the back cover of the book and wanting for fresh air. "THAT was a good book," I said aloud, to no one in the room.

After watching the movie "Blood Work" with Clint Eastwood, I was suprised at how witty the story line was. So I decided to give Connelly's novels a try, so I chose "THE POET" which I found to be very well written and filled with many twists and turns. Connelly sprinkled many details and clues throughout the novel that all came to a head in the end.

His a dialogue is realistic, and the main charactor was not this superman that didn't have hang ups or demons in his closet, which also added to the good mix.

The only aspect of this novel that disturbed me was the main villian, who is a murder/child molester to the extreme, I didn't like the constant talk of that, but despite it all I did enjoy the novel, how ever the ending was a bit abrupt, and the reason behind why the villian did it was not very clearly explained.

It did read like a movie script at times, and maybe that is what connelly is hoping for, if this is the case I think Jason Lee from "Vanilla Sky" could play the lead very well. But a good, solid, intelligent, crime mystery thiller.

I plan on reading some of Connelly's Harry Bosch series in the future.

I have heard of Michael Connelly, but had never read any of his novels until "The Poet" was given to me by a friend. This is one of the best thrillers I have read since "Silence of the Lambs". I was completely sucked into the world of the poet, and couldn't turn the pages quickly enough. I hated to see the book drawing to a close, but I also could not wait to see where the story would take me. Connelly's writing is fantastic, and really captures the mood of the story. I found his description to people and places similar to the writing of James Lee Burke, who is also a master of this genre. This is a great introduction to Connelly's writing, and I plan on following up my reading of "The Poet" with it's sequel "The Narrows". Highly recommended for fans of great police thrillers!!

This book requires you to buy into two basic premises: 1. that the FBI would allow a nobody newspaper reporter to be embedded into a major investigation (not!) and 2. a supposedly very ambitious female FBI agent would carry on an affair with the nobody newspaper reporter right under the noses of her boss and colleagues, during an active investigation (yeah right!). And the ending...don't even get me started. I was totally lost as to why the killers did what they did. Did the killers know each other? Were they in cahoots? Who knows? A reader shouldn't be so confused after slogging through 500 pages.