FAIR WARNING

5 stars out of 5

I'm not sure how I missed the first two books in this series since I'm such a big fan of the author, but somehow they slipped through the cracks. After reading this one, though, I'll make sure it doesn't happen again (and for the record, this one stands on its own quite well). Admittedly, part of the appeal is that I share the profession of Jack McEvoy, an ace investigative journalist (well, leave off the "investigative" part - my experience comes mostly at a strictly business newspaper).

Jack's work is far more exciting; he works for FairWarning, an Internet news site that specializes in exposing fraud.  For the record, this is a real nonprofit news organization (Fairwarning.org) that purports to do exactly that, and I've bookmarked it for future reference. As this story begins, Jack learns of the murder of a woman with whom he had a one-night stand a year ago. Fighting the conflict of interest potential - and his status as a person of interest to the police - his editor assigns a follow-up story on cyberstalking to him. In no time at all, he finds three other women who died of the same gruesome COD as this woman - and what's more, all of them had used the same genetic testing service to find relatives.

He's forced to team up with an experienced co-worker - a deal he grudgingly accepts - and one of his first eye-openers is that there's virtually no government oversight of the DNA testing services. One of them, in fact, is selling customer data to many other companies; what those companies do with it, or sell it to, is a concern he must investigate further. And is it possible that test results can be altered, "fudged" or switched to change the trial outcomes of murderers and rapists?

For help, he turns to a former girlfriend and former FBI agent Rachel Walling who - thanks to Jack's actions years earlier - lost her FBI job, now runs her own PI shop and is less than enthusiastic about reconnecting. But she agrees, and they make progress until one of their main sources ends up dead. Finally, patterns emerge, revealing a serial killer known as The Shrike who apparently targets his victims based on specific DNA markers. But the more Jack and Rachel learn about The Shrike, the more The Shrike learns about them. Can they track him down before he derails their efforts - perhaps permanently? Read it and see! 

Fair Warning by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown and Co., May 2020); 417 pp.