The Last Detective

My introduction to Robert Crais was via Hostage, his first stand-alone book after 8 novels featuring wise-cracking, Hawaian shirt loving PI Elvis Cole and tough and taciturn partner Joe Pike.

Hostage was a crackling read, introducing some pretty nifty twists to the whole hostage/negotiator scenario. It spurred me to pick up LA Requiem, 8th in the Cole/Pike series, but no handicap as they're all pretty stand-alone, barring a few developments on its' heroes' personal front that stretches across a few books.

As Crais himself mentiones in his web-site, start with his stand alone's and discover Cole/Pike via Requiem as it's the book that elevated a series of wise-cracking PI capers to serious Crime Thriller category, ratcheting Crais up to breathe that rarefied air in the stratosphere where heavyweight practicioner's of the craft like Michael Connelly ply their trade.

Like Connelly, Crais's novels are set in LA, and feature a complex hero navigating between plots creeping with tension and increasingly precarious relationships.

When The Last Detective opens, you learn events in LA Requiem have scarred both our heroes;

Tough as nails Joe Pike now nurses a bad arm, a result of being shot in the back, twice. "The bullets shattered his shoulder blade, spraying bone fragments like shrapnel through his left lung and the surrounding muscles and nerve".

And hunting an Alaskan Brown Bear (the largest predator on land) in the wilderness, Joe feels something he's rarely felt: fear

Elvis Cole is navigating an emotional minefield as his relationship with ex-Baton Rouge lawyer Lucy Chenier is becoming increasingly tenuous as she struggles to accept the fact that both Cole and Pike have a tendency to draw violence to them. She wants normal and the self-confessed World's Greatest Detective doesn't do normal.

And things are about to get worse....

Baby-sitting Lucy's 10-year old son Ben while she's away covering a trial, Cole is rail-roaded into every parent's worst nightmare when Ben is kidnapped right under his nose.

Enter the police, with chain smoking Carol Starkey ( a returning character from Crais' stand-alone Demolition Angel) and sex-obsessed criminalist John Chen (from Requiem) not to mention ever reliable and lethally effective Joe Pike to help and Lucy's obnoxious ex-husband and Ben's father, Richard to hinder and obstruct.

Tension mounts as the kidnappers are found to be linked to Cole's past as an Army Ranger in the Vietnam war, who allege Ben's kidnapping is retribution for atrocities Cole committed during his Tour of Duty...

Dodging the police who urge him to stay off the case, incurring Lucy's mounting anger when he doesn't while staying one step ahead of Richard, his oily lawyer Leland Myers and a duo of hired goons, Elvis and Joe race against time to locate Ben.

Multiple viewpoints (narratives switch from Cole's to Pike's, to Ben's and even the kidnappers' and plus an Omniscient overview in flashbacks to Cole's childhood and Vietnam Tour ) keep the plot hurtling along at breakneck pace.

If there's a weakness, it's that the twist in the plot can be figured out early and there's little or no complexity to the bad guys, although the trio of kidnappers, a scarred African and 2 ex-mercenaries are suitably menacing to up the chill factor (especially in a flashback account detailing their atrocities in Sierra Leone).

And my own Pet Peeve is that Crais, like Connelly and so many other writers in this genre, keep saddling their essentially lone wolf heroes with love interests only to have the relationship go belly up a few books later. Why do these women attach themselves to men knowing full well what they do, only to turn around and castigate them later for it?

But Crais redeems The Last Detective with a white knuckle, sweaty palmed, adrenaline thumping showdown that's guaranteed to notch up heartbeats.

A book to be gulped down in one sitting. It's that addictive.

The Last Detective is certainly not my last Cole/Pike book.

Starting The Forgotten Man, the next Elvis Cole mystery.

Keep you posted...