The Poet

The Poet is a thriller by the American writer Michael Connelly, published in 1996. It was his first novel not to feature the detective Harry Bosch, and the first to be told by the crime reporter Jack McEvoy.

Jack McEvoy writes about crime for the Rocky Mountain News. He is told that his identical twin brother Sean, a homicide detective in Denver, has killed himself, and he does not accept it: he goes back over the case Sean had been working, the death of a college student, and decides that the scene was arranged.

The trail leads towards a killer who writes verse about his victims and who targets police officers. The book introduces the FBI agent Rachel Walling, who appears in later novels, and it is told mostly in Jack's own voice, with passages given to a figure calling himself Eidolon. It won the Dilys Award and was later reissued with an introduction by Stephen King. Connelly had already published four novels about Harry Bosch, and this one opened a second line of books about a reporter.