Fair Warning (Connelly novel)

A drunk woman drives home with an unknown man. On their way in, she asks him if he has a nickname, to which he says no. They go up to her apartment and have sex, before he puts her in a headlock and begins to squeeze her neck. As she begins to lose consciousness, he tells her people call him "The Shrike".

Upon arriving at his apartment in the following days, reporter Jack McEvoy, now writing for the consumer watchdog news service FairWarning out of Los Angeles, is stopped by two L.A.P.D. detectives. Inside his apartment, they inform him that a woman he had a one-night stand with several months ago, Tina Portrero, was found dead in her shower during a welfare check, and that she had suffered atlanto-occipital-dislocation, or internal decapitation, in an apparent slip and fall which they have already suspected to be a cover-up for a homicide. The detectives leave after asking Jack several questions and taking a DNA sample.

Reflecting on his brief time with Tina, Jack decides to investigate the case further. He leaves a post in a forum for coroners asking for any examples of recent AOD deaths. He looks into the few examples he finds, all of them being women between their 20s and 40s, and discovers that all of them submitted samples of their DNA to an ancestry website called GT23. Unsure of where to look next, Jack reconnects with Rachel Walling. She suggests the possibility of sex addiction being a common trait in the victims. Rachel also insists that she joins Jack on the investigation.

Jack finds out that GT23 has a history of selling DNA samples to a company called Orange Nano for their research in alopecia and sets out to tour the company's headquarters as well as to interview a board member of the company, William Orton, a former professor who was accused of raping one of his students until the DNA left on her body came up with no match. Before he can leave to Santa Monica, he is arrested outside of his apartment by the detectives for obstruction.

A lab technician named Marshall Hammond works in a laboratory. He receives a message and finds Jack's name in the police system. Concerned, he and his partner Roger Vogel watch him in court before he is freed and returns to his investigation. Jack takes a fellow writer at FairWarning, Emily Atwater, onto the case. She finds Marshall Hammond's side DNA analysis business and informs Jack that he only buys female DNA from Orange Nano. In the early morning, a masked man breaks into Hammond's home and steals multiple profiles of women with the DRD4 gene. When Hammond returns home, the intruder introduces himself as The Shrike. He questions him, and then twists his neck until it breaks, the same way he murders his other victims, before staging it as a suicide.

Jack is later released from jail and goes straight to Hammond's house with Rachel to find him hanging, reporting it to the police. With their editor Myron Levin, Jack and Emily deduce that Hammond was running an illicit website where he sold the information of women with the DRD4 gene to incels, who would likely take advantage of them, and that a user on the sight named The Shrike was instead murdering them. They begin the search for Hammond's partner and share some of their findings with the FBI.

At a mall, The Shrike follows a man who he believes to be Vogel out after calling a meeting with him under Hammond's name. After finding out that the man was not Vogel, he breaks his neck and throws him off a parking garage. After receiving Vogel's identity from the FBI, Emily, Rachel, and Jack go to meet him at work. Vogel admits that he knows how to find The Shrike but is abruptly ran over in the road and killed by The Shrike himself, who escapes before the FBI can interfere. He blows up his vehicle in a parking garage and takes a plane out of Los Angeles.

Months later, the case has been made public and FairWarning has published stories with a book in the works and podcasts on the case hosted by Jack on air. When Jack meets Rachel in a bar, she points out that a man in the corner has been looking at her all night. They report this to the FBI and send them a picture, to which they concoct a plan to bait the man out and trap him. They block the man in his car and shoot him after he pulls out a gun. He is only suspected of being a supporter looking to kill Rachel.

After another few months, as Jack is leaving a podcast recording, he nearly gets into a car accident and feels movement in the back of his car. Realizing that The Shrike is in his car, he texts and calls Rachel to warn her. They set up a plan for him to drive off a highway and into a trap so that they may capture The Shrike, though, on his way there, he is caught in a traffic jam. When The Shrike reveals himself and taunts Jack, he steps on the gas and veers down the shoulder and around the traffic. When The Shrike wraps his arm around Jack's neck, he swerves the car to the side and flips it. As it tumbles several times, The Shrike is thrown from the window and is crushed under the car.

After Jack recovers, he visits Rachel at her place of work and proposes that she joins him on investigating crimes themselves as he can no longer merely report on them. She accepts.

Barry Forshaw wrote in the Financial Times, "Connelly is an astute commentator on American society, notably the prevalence of fake news filtering from the highest political echelons down to every stratum of society."[3] Critic Marilyn Stasio wrote in The New York Times, "Connelly is in terrific form here, applying genre conventions to the real-life dangers inherent in the commercial marketing of genetics research."[4] Sandra Dallas wrote in the Denver Post that the novel "sheds light on the murky billion-dollar world of DNA testing.... [which has] 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."[5]