Fair Warning by Michael Connelly

 I got back to the office in the late afternoon and started feeding the new quotes and information from RogueVogue to Emily.  She had already put together a fifteen-hundred-word story, which was generally considered the line at FairWarning when reader exhaustion starts to set in.  But the new stuff was vital.  RogueVogue was one of the two men who created Dirty4 and had sent a killer down the path of death and destruction.

--Michael Connelly, Fair Warning (Little, Brown and Company, 2020).

Michael Connolly is the prolific author of the excellent Harry Bosch novels but also has a number of other series going.  Fair Warning is the third of the Jack McEvoy novels, following The Poet (1996) and The Scarecrow (2009).  Jack's partners in seeking a killer who buys the DNA of women who have a gene that supposedly indicates loose behavior and addiction are fellow journalist Emily Atwater and former FBI agent and former lover Rachel Walling.  Connelly is a successor to Raymond Chandler, capturing  the details of life and death in Los Angeles in the present day as impressively as Chandler did for the forties.   

Now that fingerprints are being questioned as final arbiters of guilt or innocence in trials there is something of a switch to DNA for the final word.  Connelly brings this into question by showing how unregulated the field of identifying and using DNA is and how it can be, like most things, manipulated by those who have something to gain by so doing. Connelly also, within the context of a detailed hunt for a misogynistic "incel" (involuntary celibate), has considerable insight into the lives of journalists today, who have been compelled to do their research on corruption and scams for online publications rather than short-staffed newspapers.