Tracing
your ancestry is all the rage the last few years and a lot of folks are doing
it by way of various genetic testing sites. Many people are totally unaware
that once you send off your genetic material, the company that receives your genetic
materially can legally do pretty much do anything they want with it and nobody
is the wiser. It can be used, as law enforcement has done, to catch a serial
killer last active decades ago or for any purpose by anyone who buys it from
the originating company. While the FDA claims governing authority, they have
not set the rules so pretty much anything goes in this brave new world of genetics.
That is a major theme of the latest novel by Michael Connelly, Fair
Warning.
It
has been a few years since we last saw Jack McEvoy. These days he works for a
consumer protection news reporting site, FairWarning. It is a small five-person
operation run by Editor and Founder Myron Levin. (Note: both the online
publication and Myron Levin exist in these roles and author Michael Connelly is
a member of the board of directors for the nonprofit.) these days, veteran reporter
Jack McEvoy is not working his usual police beat as he now writes stories on
consumer issues. As the book opens, he has just turned in a piece about scammers
at work in the field of debt collection and how they deliberately fake things
to get consumers to pay off nonexistent debt. (Also a real thing and something
that happened to this reviewer a few years ago).
Upon
arriving at his apartment at the end of his workday, Jack McEvoy is met by LAPD
Homicide Detectives Mattson and Sakai. They have questions for him along with a
bit of an attitude on Mattson’s part. Eventually, after a bit of back and
forth, he finds out that a woman who he knew as Tina and spent just a couple of
hours within an intimate way was found dead in recent days. Christina Portrero
was brutally murdered by way of, basically, twisting her head around ninety degrees
so that everything in the spinal area of the neck violently broke loose. Because
of the fact that McEvoy’s number is in her contacts list on her cell phone and
his books are on an night table in her place, the Detectives knew he knew her
in some way and claim they want to rule him out as a suspect.
The
detectives want a voluntary saliva sample for DNA analysis which tell McEvoy
that there has to be some form of DNA on her body. As he knows that he cannot
possibly be a match, he gives the detectives what they want and sends them on
their way. That is after they ask him to take his short off so they can visually
inspect him for scratches which tells him that they may have evidence from
under her nails. Either way, he is clean and not worried about being a suspect other
than he does not appreciate being part of their investigation or the fact they
both seemed to have increasing attitude as they wasted his and their time.
He
gets to work on solving her murder despite the fact that both the police and
his editor want him to leave the story alone. The police want him to stay out
of the way. His editor argues that this kind of thing isn’t his beat anymore,
not what FairWarning does, and that he needs to be working on real news stories for their
readers and not revisiting by way of this homicide his old glory days. That is
until, thanks to McEvoy’s digging and a little help from his old friends, it begins to become clear that Tina was the
latest of a string of murders with links to DNA analysis by a certain company
that provides ancestry information and other things.
A
crime read based in large part on fact, Fair Warning by Michael
Connelly is a fast paced and intense book. Not only is it a mighty good tale,
the read is a cautionary warning about the wild west of DNA research these days
as millions of people give up their biological material with very few
safeguards or second thoughts. Those issues are thoroughly explained and
scattered throughout the book as the author does not info dump. Instead, those
pieces of information are slowly added to the tale as background info while Mr.
Connelly kept ratcheting up the pace and the hunt for a killer. The result is a
really good book. Fair Warning is definitely well worth your
time.
Fair Warning
Michael Connelly
Little, Brown and Company (Hachette Book Group)
May 2020
ISBN# 978-0-316-53945-6
Large Print Hardback (also available in audio and eBook
formats)
512 Pages
My
reading copy came by way of the Fretz Park Branch of the Dallas Public Library
System.
Kevin
R. Tipple ©2020
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