Fair Warning
By Michael Connelly, via Little, Brown and Co.
Jack McEvoy has come a long way from his days as an investigative reporter on a big-city newspaper. The veteran crime reporter who solved murders in Michael Connelly’s earlier books “The Scarecrow” and “The Poet” is now working for a watchdog website called FairWarning. His skills go to uncovering scam artists and consumer fraud.
He still longs for the big crime story, however, and when a murder investigation falls into his lap, Jack grabs it. Or rather, it grabs him.
Two cops show up at his apartment to question him about a woman whose neck was broken in a sort of whiplash fashion called atlantooccipital dislocation. The death looks like an accident, but the detectives are suspicious, and they consider Jack a suspect because he’d had a one-night stand with the woman sometime back. Jack decides to look into the murder on his own and tracks down the victim’s friend, who tells him the dead woman, who frequented bars for sex partners, had met a man who seemed to know things about her. She’d bolted.
Intrigued, Jack digs a little deeper, although murder isn’t a subject for FairWarning. He discovers that other women had died of atlantooccipital dislocation, the deaths staged to look like accidents. What links the women together is that all of them had signed up for a DNA site called GT23. Jack believes they were victims of cyberstalking and convinces his skeptical editor that this indeed is a FairWarning story.
As he delves into the world of DNA testing and analytical companies, Jack finds they are barely regulated. GT23 charges users only $23, explaining in the fine print in its contracts that the low fee is possible because the company sells data to various users. It doesn’t disclose that such companies sometimes resell the information. It’s all supposed to be anonymous of course, only it isn’t. Data buyers have ways of identifying the participants.
That’s what one small firm has done by buying data on DRD4 or “dirty four” women — those with an addiction gene. Addiction includes not only alcohol and drugs but also sex. Their names and addresses are sold to incel (involuntary celibate) men, who blame women for their inability to find sex partners. One of these women-haters is a killer known as the Shrike. And it was the Shrike who murdered Jack’s acquaintance.
Jack needs to profile the Shrike and brings in — you guessed it — his on-again-off-again paramour, former FBI agent Rachel Walling. The two haven’t seen each other since Rachel was fired two years short of being vested for leaking confidential information to Jack. She now runs her own background investigation company. Against her better judgment, Rachel joins Jack — and Emily, a second reporter assigned to the story — and the two pick up professionally as well as personally. No big surprise that both women are in danger, and of course, Jack is, too. The Shrike is one of Connelly’s more vicious villains.
“Fair Warning” sheds light on the murky billion-dollar world of DNA testing. The Federal Trade Commission originally had oversight of the industry until it got too big and turned responsibility over to the Federal Drug Administration, which does little in the way of oversight or enforcement. Labs are licensed but essentially operate on their own. All that makes the subject ripe for a good mystery.
And Michael Connelly is just the guy to write it. Score another one for the dean of America’s crime writers.
