31 years later, David Fincher's Se7en is still one of the most disturbing and defining serial killer thrillers of the 1990s. The movie follows detectives William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) and David Mills (Brad Pitt) as they investigate a string of gruesome murders, eventually learning that each victim has been chosen to represent one of the seven deadly sins. The perpetrator, John Doe, has constructed an elaborate message and forced the detectives to follow it until they become a part of the plan themselves, with the famous "What's in the box?" twist ending.
The combination of relentless killer, grisly crimes, and clues that mean far more than they initially appear is difficult to replicate, and only a few thrillers have managed to match the dark, bleak intensity of David Fincher's masterpiece. However, anyone looking for another mystery that has some of Se7en's DNA should look to a book released just one year later: Michael Connelly's The Poet. The novel's central case unfolds very differently, but it delivers another disturbing hunt for a killer whose crimes are pieces of a much larger puzzle, and it also boasts an equally great twist.
Before becoming famous for books like The Lincoln Lawyer, Michael Connelly had already established himself through his Harry Bosch novels when he published The Poet in 1996. Rather than putting another police detective at the center of the story, however, The Poet focuses on Jack McEvoy, a crime reporter for the Rocky Mountain News who has made a career from writing about death. That professional distance completely disappears when Jack learns that his brother Sean, a homicide detective, has apparently died by suicide.
Sean had been dealing with a particularly difficult murder case that he had been struggling to solve, which initially gives Jack the impression Sean's death might be exactly what it appears to be – a suicide fueled by stress and frustration. But, in typical thriller fashion, Jack begins investigating police suicides for a story and discovers a connection that points toward something much more sinister. Other homicide detectives haunted by unsolved cases become part of the pattern, while quotes from Edgar Allan Poe become the killer's calling card. As a result, Jack's attempt to understand his brother's death pulls him into a much larger investigation and puts him in grave danger. It's the exact kind of thriller premise and serial killer motive that should interest Se7en fans.
Obviously, The Poet isn't simply Se7en rewritten as a novel, but it's very easy to see why Fincher fans could become hooked on Connelly's mystery. Both Se7en and The Poet pit their protagonists against killers whose crimes have a deeper, literary-inspired edge. Neither story is content with just asking who the killer is; John Doe turns each murder into part of a grander structure, selecting victims he believes represent one of the seven deadly sins and constructing horrific punishments around greed, gluttony, pride, sloth, and lust before saving the final two – envy and wrath – for the final stage of his plan.
Somerset and Mills therefore spend much of Se7en trying to understand the logic connecting the crimes that, initially, seem impossibly different. Even once John Doe walks into the police station and identifies himself, the mystery isn't really over. The detectives still don't know what he has planned or how the two remaining sins fit into it. The Poet offers a similar experience while giving a focus to the "howdunit."
But there's enough to set both stories apart that The Poet and Se7en feel like fresh experiences. Instead of finding bodies deliberately staged around the seven deadly sins, Jack begins with deaths that have already been accepted as suicides and gradually uncovers reasons to question that explanation. Edgar Allan Poe replaces Se7en's religious symbolism as one of the threads running through the case, and Jack's profession gives the hunt another major difference: he's following a story, not trying to catch a killer. Still, The Poet is far more than a prose version of Se7en, but both understand that the most unsettling thrillers don't always need an incredibly high body count. Instead, the killers are several steps ahead all along.
Se7en and The Poet save their most disturbing revelations until the very end, but they use those twists in totally different ways. Neither killer commits crimes that can be understood in isolation; Somerset and Mills have to recognize that seemingly unrelated victims have been selected according to John Doe's interpretation of the seven deadly sins, while The Poet plays a much more recognizable game of "who is the killer?", though it repeatedly makes both Jack and the reader question whether that has actually been answered, and adds a "how did they do it?" element. Both stories become exercises in finding the pattern behind the murders. Where the two really separate, however, is what happens when those patterns begin to make sense.
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