If I ever get kidnapped I want Joe Pike looking for me.
Private detective Elvis Cole gets hired to find a young woman because she dropped out of sight If I ever get kidnapped I want Joe Pike looking for me.
Private detective Elvis Cole gets hired to find a young woman because she dropped out of sight for a few days. The mother suspects that her daughter is with a boyfriend that she disapproves of, and that this is a case of college aged kids just off having some irresponsible fun. However, Elvis quickly figures out that the couple were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and were swept up as part of scheme in which illegal immigrants crossing into the US are kidnapped and held for whatever ransom their loved ones can scrape together. Cole enlists the help of his partner Joe Pike and has a plan to locate the missing kids, but things go sideways and Cole ends up being held, too. With the help of a fellow mercenary Pike begins a methodical hunt for his friend.
This one has all the hallmarks of your typical Cole & Pike novel. Elvis runs around doing some clever detective work while Pike shows up at opportune moments to unleash hell, and Crais has mastered using that formula with these characters to deliver exciting crime/action novels. Unfortunately, I think Crais fell into a trap of his own making here that hurts the story.
It’s clear from the title and book jacket summary that Elvis is going to get kidnapped and that Pike will have to find him. I saw Crais in an interview at Bouchercon back in 2011 in which he mentioned that the book he was writing at that time involved Elvis being taken and Pike getting him back. So that’s obviously the hook he started with and built the novel around. It’s a good idea for a story so I understand why Crais committed to it early on.
However, to really do that idea then Elvis should probably get snatched by the end of the first act, and that means that rest of the story would be on Pike’s shoulders with Elvis being a supporting player. Crais has done that before in a couple of Pike-centric book so it shouldn’t be a problem, but for some reason he wanted Elvis to be a big part of this one doing his usual detective thing. So to keep the core idea of Elvis being kidnapped in place while still making him an active figure in the plot Crais structured the book so that it flash forwards to the point after Elvis has been taken with Pike on the hunt along with the parallel story of Elvis trying to find the woman.
The problem is that by telling us that Cole is going be kidnapped from the jump it just makes his story a foregone conclusion which robs it of its drama. At the same time even with the flash-forwards he doesn’t get the Pike on the hunt piece really moving until the third act. Since that’s the story I was told this book was about and because the structure keeps reminding me that it’s coming, I was kind of tapping my foot the entire time I was reading and just wishing that we’d get to the fireworks factory already.
I probably would have liked this better if Crais had just fully committed to Cole kidnapping plot and had it happen much sooner and told the story in a linear fashion. Or he could have sold this book as it just being another Cole/Pike case about them looking for a kidnapped woman and saved the Cole kidnapping as a plot turn at the end of the second act. Crais is pretty good at throwing unexpected twists in at times, and that could have been a real doozy. Then the third act could have been Pike’s relentless hunt to find his friend, and it would have been a lot tenser.
As it is, it felt like Crais really fell in love with that elevator pitch of “Cole gets taken. Pike has to find him.” But then he couldn’t bear to just let Cole play that role. So he tried to have his cake and eat it, too.
It’s still a pretty solid book in an entertaining series, but I still feel a little disappointed in the way it played out....more
If you can’t stop to put air in your tires without having to prevent some thugs from beating up somebody then you just might be the hero of an action/If you can’t stop to put air in your tires without having to prevent some thugs from beating up somebody then you just might be the hero of an action/crime novel.
Professional bad-ass Joe Pike keeps a sandwich shop owner from getting pummeled by some local gangsters running a protection racket, and as a bonus he meets the owner’s good looking niece, Dru, who seems interested in him. Unfortunately, the punks seem intent on getting revenge, and when Joe can’t locate Dru or her uncle following some gruesome vandalism at the restaurant he fears the worst. Joe enlists the help of his detective partner Elvis Cole to help him find the missing people. What looks to be a simple case of payback by a street gang soon turns out to be a tangled mess involving murder, the FBI, and a psychotic hitman whose deadly skills are more than a match for Pike’s.
This series started out with Elvis as the main character who was your pretty typical smart-ass private detective with Joe as the trusty violent friend who always wore sunglasses and rarely spoke. Elvis got better when Robert Crais toned down his smart mouth and gave him some feelings, and by switching Pike to the lead character in some of the later novels we learned that he’s actually more a tragic and damaged figure than the typical ‘80s macho action type he seemed at the start. That shift continues to pay off in this book, and one of the selling points for me is the odd couple friendship the two men share with the outgoing and friendly Cole completely understanding the closed off Pike to the point where almost no conversation is necessary between the two.
While the set-up sounds like a straight ahead action thriller there’s also a lot of solid twists and turns to the plot that constantly subvert expectations and make some detective work necessary. So we get Pike in full hunter mode as he keeps pushing to find the missing people. That keeps the story momentum going while Cole does some of the leg work that uncovers that Pike’s potential new snuggle bunny isn’t quite who she said she was. Which also adds some emotion to the Pike part of the equation while Cole has to worry about how his friend is dealing with all of it. So it’s a nice blend of tension with enough character stuff to make it feel like it has some emotional stakes to it.
The only thing I found lacking was the sadistic killer. He’s genuinely scary at times as well as a former mercenary like Pike so that gives us a worthy foe. However, he’s just a little too crazy town banana pants to be believable. It’s hard to accept that a guy who actually hears voices in his head and believes that zombies are real can be operating at such a high level and also capable of staying ahead of the law for years.
Still, that’s a minor complaint, and overall I really enjoyed this one as another solid piece of work from Crais....more
A retired mercenary and his entire family are brutally murdered in what appears to be a home invasion robbery. This wasn’t just any ex-merc though. HeA retired mercenary and his entire family are brutally murdered in what appears to be a home invasion robbery. This wasn’t just any ex-merc though. He was an old buddy of professional kicker of asses Joe Pike, and Joe promptly sets out on a revenge rampage. I do so love a good revenge rampage!
Robert Crais has done something off-beat in his modern PI series that usually stars Elvis Cole as the first person hero of the story with Joe Pike featuring as the bad ass buddy that might as well be put in a glass case with the words BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY stenciled on it. Crais has always done a good job of creating the sense of a real bond between Pike and Cole without explaining it, but by occasionally doing a book from Joe’s third person POV it adds a new wrinkle to the series that sheds light on Cole as well as the relationship between the two men.
An internalized no-nonsense character like Pike works best as a weapon to be deployed, and this is the kind of plot that utilizes him well with him instantly picking up a trail that leads to Serbian gangsters and going after them with the subtly of a brick through a windshield. Then we get Cole coming in at the edges of the story to do the detective work and back Joe up as needed. Not that he needs much of it.
My favorite part was when Pike starts to systematically hit the gang in the pocketbook by going after their sources of income, and that seems like what he’s best suited to do. When the story started adding twists and turns it started to feel more like an Elvis Cole book that could have used more of his point of view rather than just being the support staff. Frankly, I expected to see Joe Pike mowing through ruthless gangsters John Wick style in this and was a little disappointed I didn’t get more of that.
It’s still solid work by Crais, and an entertaining crime story overall. However, I would have preferred a bit more rampaging by Pike and a little less plot. ...more
Elvis Cole was instrumental in clearing Lionel Bird after he was accused of brutally murdering a young woman. Three years later Bird commits suicide aElvis Cole was instrumental in clearing Lionel Bird after he was accused of brutally murdering a young woman. Three years later Bird commits suicide and leaves behind a photo album that indicates that not only did he kill the woman that Cole investigated, he also murdered others before and after that.
Oops.
Cole reexamines the evidence he gathered and is still convinced that Bird was innocent of that crime. So where did the pictures of the dead women come from? And why is a LAPD task force led by an ambitious deputy chief declaring the cases now closed but still secretly gathering evidence? Is Cole just grasping at straws to avoid admitting that he screwed up and potentially got some innocent women killed? With the help of his trusty partner Joe Pike, Elvis is determined to get answers and refuses to quit even when confronted with pressure from the cops and angry family members of one of the victims.
This one comes at a point when Elvis and Joe had spent several of the previous books working cases with intensely personal angles to them with severe consequences. The set-up for this seems like it’d be another in that line with Elvis starting out understandably upset that he might have inadvertently helped a murderer go free to kill again, but that angle sort of fades away in the second half of the book. In fact, it’s a little odd how this one starts out with Elvis having so much personally invested, but then it turns into what could be considered an almost routine investigation by Cole and Pike’s usual standards. It’s almost as if Crais started writing this and decided to scale back how much it’d personally impact Cole by the end of it.
There’s also some loose ends and things that don’t make a lot of sense plot wise. (view spoiler)[Part of what makes Elvis and the reader believe that Deputy Chief Marx is dirty and covering for a murderous politician is the threat that Marx makes against Elvis’ cop buddy Lou Poitras. But that threat doesn’t make a lot of sense once you know that Marx was actually trying to do the right thing and secretly investigate the politician. We're supposed to buy that Marx is a good guy after all, yet he is willing to ruin the career of another cop because Elvis is asking questions? Marx might be making an empty threat to back Elvis off, but what if Elvis had told Lou and then he kicked up some kind official fuss about it?
Elvis and the cops come across as a little simple at the end because they get caught flat-footed when the sister kills Levy, and Cole even says something about having no idea she might do something like that. Really? The woman either killed or set-up one guy she thought killed her sister, and you had no clue she might pull something similar on the guy who actually did it? Hell, I know what she was going to do as soon as Crais described her fake stumble into the tools in the van, and I’m not a cop or a bad ass PI.
And for all guilt that Crais tries to heap on Elvis with him taking shit from the cop Crimmens and the Repko family, we don’t get much satisfaction in the way of atonement at the end. The final scene with Cole and Marx watching them pull bodies out of Levy's rose garden wasn’t a bad way to end it, but it would have been nice to know that Crimmens actually felt guilty for all the crap he’d flung Cole’s way. Or that Cole settled up with him as he promised to do for putting the family on his ass in the first place. It would have been nice to get something from the Repko family thanking Cole for finally helping to find the real killer. All of this stuff is a big part of the book, and yet it just seems to drift away with no effort to address any of it. (hide spoiler)]
It’s typically solid work from Crais, but it almost seems like he started one book and then turned it into another that wouldn’t put Cole through such a wringer this time out so it never reaches the kind of highs I’ve seen from this series at its best....more
It’s probably a good thing that Robert Crais has a strict policy against selling the film rights to his Elvis Cole and Joe Pike characters because I cIt’s probably a good thing that Robert Crais has a strict policy against selling the film rights to his Elvis Cole and Joe Pike characters because I can see how this could go horribly off the rails in the wrong hands. The bad Hollywood pitch for this movie:
“There’s this rich girl, like a Paris Hilton type, right? And she gets into a car accident, but the people in the car flee the scene even though they’re injured. She identifies one of them as this big time money launderer that the Feds want, but she is attacked by a small army of hit men. That’s where Joe Pike comes in. See, he’s this real bad ass. He’s been a soldier and a cop and a mercenary, and now he sometimes partners up with this guy named Elvis in a detective agency. The Elvis guy would make for a funny supporting character. Maybe we could get someone like Seth Green to play him?
Anyhow, this Pike is a real intense dude. Wears sunglasses all the time and has these red arrows tattooed on his arms. Kids these days love tattoos so that’ll make him relatable. And of course, he and the rich girl don’t get along at all. He’s trying to protect her, and she’s being a real pain in the balls.
Funny? Well, the book isn’t really that funny because of all the killing. But we could downplay that and punch up the interactions between Pike and the girl. Maybe get more of a romance going between them. And since this girl is like Paris Hilton, why not see if the real Paris Hilton is interested? For Pike maybe… Vin Diesel? He‘d be good, but I don‘t think we got the budget ….I got it! Steven Seagal would be perfect.
That’s the tricky part about this. This story could have turned out like a typical Hollywood set-up, but as usual Crais has the skill and ability to take an action movie scenario and add just enough depth and heart to it to make it about more than a bad ass racking up a body count. I thought Joe Pike seemed like a stereotypical cartoon in the early Cole books, but through the course of this series Crais has established that Pike doesn’t wear his sunglasses at night and rarely speaks because he’s trying to be cool. Pike behaves like that because he’s an emotional cripple who has genuine problems interacting with people. That makes him both tragic and scarier than just a tough guy playing at being stoic.
This also adds another wrinkle to the Elvis Cole series because we aren’t getting his first person viewpoint as the lead character, we’re seeing Elvis from an outside vantage point and that adds another dimension to him, too. (This reveals several plot resolutions from previous Elvis books so anyone interested in the series should read them in the published order to avoid spoilers.)
Crais was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America last week, and with books like this, it’s easy to see why....more
Recent events haven’t been kind to Elvis Cole, and he’s moping around the house in the middle of the night when he gets a phone call from the police tRecent events haven’t been kind to Elvis Cole, and he’s moping around the house in the middle of the night when he gets a phone call from the police telling him that a man murdered in an alley claimed to be Elvis’s long lost father with his dying breath.
Well, if that doesn’t cheer him up, nothing will.
Elvis has never had a real clue about who his father was and thinks that the man was just another wack-a-doo that has come out of the woodwork following an unwelcome amount of publicity after his last case. Still, even the possibility that the victim may have been his pops inspires Elvis to start trying to figure out who the man was and brings up a lot of old feelings as well as unknowingly putting him on a collision course with a killer.
Once again Crais serves up an intriguing plot that zig-zags in unexpected directions. The previous two books, L.A. Requiem and The Last Detective, along with this one have filled a lot of the history of Elvis and his partner Joe Pike so that now they seem like fully formed characters with some serious damage in their pasts that cause them to hide behind the personas of smart ass detective and his bad ass buddy.
Another thing I liked in this is that the bad guy is crazy. I don’t mean crazy in the clichéd Hannibal Lector way where the serial killer is insane but also a genius and capable of making intricate plans. I mean crazy in the sense of crazy town banana pants. I mean this son-of-a-bitch is CRAZY in the kind of random way where he’ll convince himself that invisible assassins are sneaking up on him, and there’s no telling when he may explode into unpredictable and brutal violence. After so many portrayals of the insane villains also being brilliant in crime fiction, it was refreshingly terrifying to have a true Crazy McCrazyperson with poor impulse control and a shotgun lurking around.
My one complaint on this one requires a massive spoiler. I’m giving up the end of the book here so don’t click if you don’t want to know. (view spoiler)[ The scene at the end when Elvis has been shotgunned and lays dying while Pike kills his attacker and then administers CPR which then transitions to Elvis’s death dream of a family was remarkably similar to a scene in one of the Robert B. Parker Spenser novels done years earlier. It’s powerful and well written, and it’s different enough from the Spenser one to not raise my eyebrows too much. However, it’s familiarity did hurt its emotional impact on me. (hide spoiler)].
This is a series in which the author has managed to raise the bar with almost every book. ...more
I started this book at bed time thinking that I’d read a couple of chapters before shutting off the light. I ended up reading almost a 100 pages beforI started this book at bed time thinking that I’d read a couple of chapters before shutting off the light. I ended up reading almost a 100 pages before reluctantly putting it down to get some sleep. So I’m gonna go ahead and put this one in in my personal Page Turner Hall of Fame.
Elvis Cole is babysitting his girlfriend Lucy’s son, Ben, but the kid gets snatched when Elvis takes his eyes off him for like 17 seconds. Then comes a phone call in which the kidnapper tells Elvis that Ben was taken as revenge for something he did during his time as a US Army Ranger in Vietnam. While the mission the kidnapper references was a clusterfuck of the highest order that left Elvis as the sole survivor, it wasn’t his fault, and Elvis can not think of anyone who could possibly hold some kind of grudge over it. Adding to the fun, Lucy’s rich asshole of an ex-husband shows up and makes a bad situation worse.
Crais has a background as a TV writer and often starts with a story that sounds like it could have been the set-up for an episode of Magnum P.I., but he’s got this great ability to take those initial plots into surprising and exciting new directions. So while this one begins with the idea of old war history coming back to bite someone in the ass, Crais then twists that concept into a story you haven’t read before.
Aside from a terrific main plot with a relentless momentum, this one has many bonus features. We get some of Cole’s history, including the origin of why he’s named Elvis. Carol Starkey, the great lead character from Demolition Angel, shows up in an exceptionally strong supporting role. There’s also a top notch sub-plot with Joe Pike being less than his usual bad ass self thanks to injuries sustained in the previous book. I loved that Pike’s idea of physical therapy is going into the Alaskan wilderness and tracking a rabid grizzly bear.
And best of all, (view spoiler)[ it looks like we’re finally rid of Lucy. Which is a great relief because she was in danger of turning into a Susan level of annoyance, and I’m glad to see that Crais apparently learned from Robert B. Parker’s mistakes. (hide spoiler)]
Maybe the best feature of this book is that between it and the previous one, L.A. Requiem, Crais has added a lot of depth to Elvis and Joe Pike so that they no longer seem like just the cliché of the wise ass detective and his bad ass friend. Now they’re damaged characters, and readers have a better understanding of why they are who they are.
Not only is this my favorite of the series, it’s a new addition to my favorite novels of the private detective genre....more
What’s this? Joe Pike has a personal history? And emotions? I was thinking he was just another Bad Ass Friend of the lead in a crime novel. Is this evWhat’s this? Joe Pike has a personal history? And emotions? I was thinking he was just another Bad Ass Friend of the lead in a crime novel. Is this even allowed?
Elvis Cole gets a call from Joe asking for help. Elvis is shocked when he finds wealthy Frank Garcia treating Joe like a son and begging him to find his missing daughter Karen. Even more shocking, Joe used to date Karen and admits to Elvis that he broke her heart. The two detectives start looking, but the LAPD quickly shows up to break the news that Karen was murdered.
Frank uses all his money and political juice to get Elvis and Joe into the police investigation so they can make sure the cops are doing everything possible, but the lead detective is an old enemy of Joe’s. Things quickly get messy.
This another high quality story about Elvis and Joe, and Crais gets personal this time out. Through flashbacks we learn a lot about Joe’s background including his ugly childhood, why he had to leave the LAPD and why the cops still hate him years later. It adds a lot of welcome depth to a character who could sometimes seem on the cartoonish side.
Once again, the only piece I was left cold on was Elvis’s relationship with his girlfriend Lucy. I’m not even sure why I don’t like her. Crais does a nice job of building up a believable reason for tension and conflict between the two. It’s a dilemma where you can see both sides so I should have felt torn by it, but I was just left hoping that Elvis will finally dump her for good. ...more
Elvis gets hired by three kids to find their missing father and after the trail leads to Seattle, the detective finds himself on the bad side of some Elvis gets hired by three kids to find their missing father and after the trail leads to Seattle, the detective finds himself on the bad side of some Russian mobsters and the U.S. Marshals Service. Sadly, Elvis does not meet Raylan Givens.
Elvis not only has to hunt down the missing dad, he’s also got an interesting dilemma with the kids. The oldest daughter does a good job of taking care of the younger two so Elvis doesn’t want to rat them out to social services, but what he learns about the missing father makes him sure he’s going to have a hard decision at some point.
Once again when the shit hits the fan and things get violent, Elvis and Joe Pike will have risk their lives while trying to strike a balance between doing what’s best for their clients and what’s legal.
This is my favorite book yet in the series. Elvis has to detect his ass off, and then he’s scrambling around while trying to deal with the kids, gangsters and the government. The story takes a lot of good twists and turns, and Crais once again delivers exciting action via his soft-hearted hero.
My only complaint is that there’s yet another sub-plot dealing with Elvis’s long-distance girlfriend Lucy, and this one also introduces an evil ex-husband into the mix that will probably mean trouble down the line. I’m not sure why but their relationship has all the chemistry of a dead battery to me. I don’t dislike the Lucy character, I just find her kind of blah, and I don’t really buy Elvis’s love for her. Any time the story veered in that direction, I was counting pages until Elvis got back to the main plot again.
Despite that, it’s still a helluva fun and entertaining detective yarn....more
This book has such an outlandish plot to it. Honestly, could anyone believe that a rich and famous person could possibly get away with murder by havinThis book has such an outlandish plot to it. Honestly, could anyone believe that a rich and famous person could possibly get away with murder by having a high priced legal team that obscures the facts by putting the police department on trial and manipulating the media to…. What’s that you say? O.J.? Robert Blake? Michael Jackson’s molestation trial? That NBA player who shotgunned his limo driver in front of multiple witnesses, and they couldn’t even get a jury to convict him of manslaughter?
Hey, at least Phil Spector went to prison even if it took two trials and appeals that reached the Supreme Court level.
The wife of a wealthy and famous L.A restaurateur is found dead, and the bloody murder weapon is found on his property by an ambitious LAPD detective named Angela Rossi. Elvis Cole is hired by the high profile defense attorney to investigate Rossi to see if charges about her previously planting evidence have any merit. Elvis finds himself performing as a reluctant clown in a media circus as he tries to get at the truth.
Published in 1996, it’s pretty obvious that Crais was thinking of the O.J. trial when he came up with this, but he changes it up enough so that it doesn’t feel like a ripped-from-the-headlines type story. There’s also a nice wrinkle in that Elvis’s generally good relationship with the LAPD become understandably strained by his investigation, and even his partner (and ex-cop) Joe Pike acts like he wishes Elvis would have taken a pass on this one.
I was going to bitch that Elvis seemed a bit naïve about the media for a L.A. based private detective who deals with the entertainment industry quite a bit, but then I remembered that this written just as the 24 hour news cycle was discovering that missing blondes and murdered children make for good ratings so it’s realistic that Elvis is a bit flabbergasted at the media firestorm.
My only complaint is that there’s a subplot with Elvis’s lady friend from Louisiana paying a visit, and as in the previous book, I’m just not buying his sudden and deep love for Lucy. I don’t really know why because she doesn’t annoy me, and I like that Crais is trying to build up a personal life for Elvis. But it’s just not clicking with me for some reason....more
Jodi Taylor is an actress starring on a hit TV show who was adopted. She hires Elvis to track down her birth parents but claiElvis Cole - Cajun style!
Jodi Taylor is an actress starring on a hit TV show who was adopted. She hires Elvis to track down her birth parents but claims she just wants her medical history. Elvis journeys to Louisiana, but what seems like a routine case soon turns into a tangled mess of blackmail and murder.
Robert Crais is originally from Louisiana, and he brings some real depth to his depiction of the area and it’s people. You can feel the humidity as he describes Elvis making his way through bayou country. Plus, he does such a great job of describing the food that I wanted fly to New Orleans just to get some etouffee.
The mystery and action in this one are very solid, but overall the story just didn’t grab me as much as the previous two novels did. There’s a subplot with Elvis romancing a beautiful lawyer that I could have lived without, but it wasn’t overly distracting from the main story. As usual, my favorite parts revolved around scenes where Elvis and his partner Joe Pike work together. The two of them are rapidly becoming one of my favorite buddy teams in crime stories....more
I have to think that Robert Crais got a little freaked out during the O.J. Simpson murder trial when the allegations of racism against detective Mark I have to think that Robert Crais got a little freaked out during the O.J. Simpson murder trial when the allegations of racism against detective Mark Fuhrman came up because just a few years earlier he had written this book that had some corrupt LAPD cops including an officer named Mark Thurman.
“Life this is Art. Art, meet my good friend Life. Try not to imitate each other too much if you can help it.”
Private investigator Elvis Cole is hired by a young woman named Jennifer Sheridan because she’s worried that her boyfriend, LAPD officer Mark Fuhrman Thurman, has been behaving oddly and she’s convinced that he’s gotten involved in something illegal. Elvis and his partner Joe Pike are soon caught up in a nasty mess involving South Central gangs and crooked cops
This one was humming along as an entertaining private detective yarn when Crais threw a huge curve ball in the middle of the story that I did not see coming at all. With that one twist, he spun the plot off into an unexpected direction and raised the stakes enourmously. Very nicely done, Mr. Crais.
I particularly like how Crais portrays the relationship between Elvis and Joe when things get hairy. There are no long speeches or discussion of how they know they can count on each other, but when the shit hits the fan, the two men are perfectly in sync and know the next steps they’ll need to take without even discussing it. It’s rapidly becoming one of my favorite tough guy partnerships. ...more
I’d been hoping that I’d enjoy this series to give me some fresh detective stories, but the results had been mixed so far. TheNow that’s more like it!
I’d been hoping that I’d enjoy this series to give me some fresh detective stories, but the results had been mixed so far. The Monkey's Raincoat and Stalking the Angel had a lot I liked, but Elvis Cole and his bad-ass friend Joe Pike were seeming like pale imitations of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser & Hawk to me. Plus, the over the top quirkiness of Elvis’s character and his constant smart ass comments got on my nerves. I’m now thinking that Crais needed a few books to find his own rhythm, and I enjoyed the hell out of this third book in the series.
Elvis gets hired by famous action move director Peter Alan Nelson to locate the son he had from a brief marriage ten years earlier. Nelson is a self-centered prick and supreme asshole enabled by the movie studio and a squad of sycophants. He’s like a less charming version of Brett Ratner. Elvis quickly tracks down the ex-wife Karen to a small town in Connecticut where she’s built a good life for her and her son, but she’s having some issues with being tangled up with the Mafia and a psychotic gangster. Elvis wants to help Karen out, but dealing with the mob will be easy compared to trying to cope with Peter Alan Nelson and his gigantic ego.
I got to meet Robert Crais and watch him on a couple of panels at Bouchercon in St. Louis, and after listening to the guy, my opinion of him improved tremendously. (See Dan’s write-up about our Bouchercon adventure and watching an interview with Crais for more details.)
There were several things that impressed me about Crais. He seemed to take his writing very seriously while still obviously enjoying the hell out of his success and having a great sense of humor. I was surprised at the amount of work he said he put into the books because I think a lot of us tend to imagine that popular thriller writers churn these books out with a minimum of effort while checking their bank accounts, but per Crais, he goes through some long hours in front of the computer and is more than a little frustrated that it hasn’t gotten easier over the years like he once thought it would.
I also liked that Crais can admit when he’s made mistakes and then corrects them. One of my biggest complaints about the first couple of Cole novels was that Elvis was just such a relentless smart ass. I like a wise cracking detective as much as the next crime fiction fan, but if the hero responds with snark to every situation, it gets old in a hurry. Crais said that he realized early in the series that you can’t use humor to respond to things like serious crimes, and he scaled that back. It was evident in this book because when things get ugly, Elvis doesn’t react with a parade of one-liners like he did in the previous books.
I think I’m on my way to becoming a big fan of Robert Crais. You can check out some of the Bouchercon interview I mentioned here. ...more
Damn it, Robert Crais. I really want to like you, but two books in and this still feels like awkward blind dating rather than true love.
Elvis Cole is Damn it, Robert Crais. I really want to like you, but two books in and this still feels like awkward blind dating rather than true love.
Elvis Cole is hired by wealthy Bradley Warren to recover a rare Japanese manuscript that has been stolen. Warren only cares about using the manuscript to impress his Japanese business partners. When Warren’s wife and daughter are threatened, too, Elvis ends up getting on the bad side of the yakuza.
I should be all over these Crais novels. A smart-mouthed gun-toting PI with a bad ass friend is something that I can’t get enough of in other books. But something just isn’t clicking here. When I read the first Elvis Cole novel, The Monkey’s Raincoat, I thought that Crais was doing a west coast version of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels and that impression continues here.
The Monkey’s Raincoat turned into a much better book about halfway through, and I was looking for this one to move up a gear, too. Unfortunately, while Crais tried, he didn’t succeed as well as the first one. I still had the same complaints. Elvis doesn’t seem so much like a character as a creation of character traits from the ‘80s school of wise ass detectives. I’m surprised he isn’t meeting Axel Foley for beers.
It isn’t Crais’ fault that I’m reading these over 20 years after he wrote them and that they seem dated in a lot of ways to me, but there are just too many clichés for me too overlook in this. Bradley Warren is a rich asshole right out of central casting. His wife is a neglected drunk with hot pants. His daughter is ignored. His secretary is all business and loyal to him, but eventually warms up to Elvis’s unorthodox methods. There’s an Asian factor to the plot so the yakuza has to be involved. The Bad Ass Criminal Friend is Joe Pike who always wears his sunglasses, even at night. When trying to stir things up, Elvis and Joe go to a club that the bad guys hang out in and cause a scene to get a reaction. *yawn* I think I saw all this in a movie starring Michael Pare in 1989.
Plus, Elvis is just such a relentless smart ass that he tends to get on my nerves. Characters like Marlowe, Spenser or Lehane’s Patrick Kenzie can be wise asses and tough guys, but it feels like Cole can’t let the mildest thing go by without trying to act like a comic at open mic night.
There’s also a lot that doesn’t make sense. At one point, Elvis and Joe are together trying to find someone. Then they split up and Elvis spends like two days flying solo when he tracks that person down and does a bunch of other stuff without once calling Joe, who one assumes spent all that time looking for this person himself because Elvis doesn’t bother to tell him that he figured it all out. That’s just some weak story telling.
Still, I find myself liking Crais’s writing and these books. I hope that as the books get in the ‘90s and beyond that Elvis will start maturing and be a detective who occasionally makes a smart ass comment rather than a smart ass playing detective....more
I hated the ‘80s. Hated them while I was living through them and twenty years later I still get slightly queasy when I think about that time. So when I hated the ‘80s. Hated them while I was living through them and twenty years later I still get slightly queasy when I think about that time. So when I was reading this book written in 1987, and the hero is bragging about wearing white jeans with a white jacket to cover up his shoulder holster, I leaned over and vomited with visions of Sonny Crockett dancing in my head. Fortunately, it got much better.
Robert Crais is one of those mystery writers I’ve been meaning to read for a while now. When I came across his first novel in a used bookstore, it seemed like a good time to give him a try. But even aside from the ‘80s setting, we got off to a rocky start.
I just got done with a marathon reading session of the early Spenser books after Robert B. Parker‘s recent death, and all I could think for the first quarter of this book was that Parker should have sued Crais when he had the chance. The main character Elvis Cole seemed like a younger west coast version of Spenser, and his bad-ass friend seemed like a watered down version of Hawk. The wise-ass dialogue, the lavish descriptions of what Elvis was eating, and the tough guy macho schtick caused me to roll my eyes several times because it almost seemed like a parody of Parker. Add in the dated ‘80s element and this thing was headed for 1 star.
Plus, it seemed like Crais was going out of his way to make Elvis a little too quirky. A detective who is a Vietnam vet was a cliché, but ALL the heroes in stories during the ‘80s were Vietnam vets so I can roll with that. But a private detective named Elvis who does yoga and marital arts, decorates his office with Disney mementos, and he has a mean cat that drinks beer?? That’s a writer just reaching to try and make an offbeat and eccentric character. I was not impressed as we were introduced.
Something happened about halfway through the book, though. Crais seemed to find his own rhythm, and Elvis started seeming less like a collection of character traits and morphed into a protagonist I was actually interested in. The story and the action ramped up nicely to a slam-bang ending. If he got that much better over the course of one book, I’m really interested in seeing how much more Crais improved over the years and considering the lists of awards he’s won, it looks like he has been living up to the promise he showed here. ...more
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