The Poet Book

Oh, mid-'90s, how quaint you seem in this book published in '96 with your dial-up internet connections, faxes, pagers, landline phones, and new-fangled digital cameras.

Perhaps the thing dating this the most is the idea that The Rocky Mountain News editors' biggest concern is that they'll get scooped by another newspaper in the fast paced world of print journalism, and not that their entire industry will collapse and they'll be out of business by 2009.

Of course, if all their reporters acted like Jack McEvoy, it's no wonder they went broke. Jack's twin brother was a cop who apparently shot himself, but when Jack decides to exploit his tragic death by writing a story about police suicides, the research indicates that a serial killer has been stalking cops across the country and making it look like they killed themselves. Soon Jack has blackmailed his way onto an FBI task force chasing the killer by ruthlessly threatening to expose the hunt and maybe spooking the guy, but letting his brother's murderer potentially go free is a small price to pay to get a really righteous scoop. He runs up a huge expense account bill by tagging along as the FBI tracks the killer across the country, and he never really does give the Denver paper the juicy exclusives they're expecting. So it seems like the old Rocky Mountain News had some pretty sloppy business practices going on when it came to covering stories.

You can probably tell that I wasn't overly fond of Jack as a character. I found him self-absorbed and incredibly stupid at times. It's too bad, because this was a better than average serial killer story with new take on the premise and lots of good twists and turns to keep it interesting. If I would have found Jack more sympathetic, I probably would have liked it more.