The Scarecrow - Michael Connelly (Jack McEvoy #2)

The Scarecrow features the return of journalist, Jack McEvoy.  On the eve of his forced retirement from the paper, McEvoy learns of a 16-year-old drug dealer who has confessed to a murder.  Under the guise of investigating the boy's innocence, McEvoy uncovers one of the biggest stories since his encounter with the Poet years earlier.  He teams up again with FBI agent, Rachel Walling, in a race against the real killer and the government conspiracy to cover it all up.  As with the first McEvoy novel, the fact that he is a journalist, rather than an attorney or actual detective, meant that he was often making ridiculous leaps in logic, or otherwise trying to scoop the story rather than get to the whole truth - which I found consistently annoying throughout the novel. But, of course, those leaps are what allow for all the crazy twists and turns necessary for a good story.