The Nature of Things

Well, that was fun. The World's Greatest Detective, Elvis Cole, is back on his home turf of Los Angeles after a sojourn in Louisiana in the last book. In Louisiana, he met Lucy Chenier, who, along with her young son, is still a part of his life.  In Los Angeles, high-powered defense attorney Jonathan Green is defending millionaire restauranteur Teddy Martin who is charged with his wife's brutal murder. Green hires the WGD to try to prove that an LAPD detective named Angela Rossi planted evidence - namely the murder weapon - to make Martin appear guilty. Elvis' investigation doesn't go the way Green wants it to. In fact, he proves just the opposite. Angela Rossi seems clean and dedicated to her job and it looks like Martin is guilty. Green thanks Elvis for his work and moves on. But soon it appears that some of the people interviewed by Elvis are unaccountably changing their stories to make it appear that Rossi is untrustworthy and Green's appearances on television n...

Returning to my reading of Robert Crais's Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series, I've reached entry number five, Voodoo River . I think it may be my favorite so far, although it's hard to say just why that is. It follows the by now familiar formula. Elvis, "The World's Greatest Detective," is hired by someone in trouble, usually a beautiful woman, to extricate her from that trouble. He noodles around doing his detecting thing until he more or less stumbles into a theory of what's going on and how to solve the problem, at which point his more deadly partner, Joe Pike, enters the game and the two of them clean up Dodge, usually with a lot of gunfire involved. I think perhaps my liking of this book may have something to do with its setting. Most of the action takes place in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, places that I have visited and have some familiarity with, so perhaps it was easier for me to enter into the action. Anyway, for whatever reason, it was an entertaining r...

Free Fall by Robert Crais My rating: 4 of 5 stars A dame walks into a PI's office and gives him forty dollars and a promise of weekly payments to find out what kind of trouble her fiance, an LA cop, is in. And maybe get him out of it. Elvis Cole is just the kind of quirky private investigator who can't say no to a beautiful woman and so he takes the case. It turns out that the fiance is in a lot more trouble than his client or Elvis could possibly have imagined, and the result is another fast-paced tale that just dares the reader to be able to put it down. Within the confines of a typical violence-ridden Robert Crais plot, the author manages to tackle and address a number of controversial issues in Free Fall . He gives us a look at life in South Central LA with its gangs and, in some instances, an unspoken complicity between the gangs and the police. We see police brutality at its sickening worst and the cover-ups that are all too often the police's knee-jerk reaction to s...

Lullaby Town by Robert Crais My rating: 3 of 5 stars The World's Greatest Detective, Elvis Cole, gets hired by the world's third most famous movie director, Peter Alan Nelson, to locate his ex-wife and son whom he lost contact with when the son was just a baby more than ten years ago. Nelson is a world-class narcissist that the movie studios just can't say no to, because he makes so much money for them with his adventure films. He always travels with an entourage and every sentence, every thought begins and ends with "I." Finding the ex-wife and son proves to be easy enough for the World's Greatest Detective, even though she has changed her name and tried to obliterate any trace of her relationship with Nelson. She's living in a small town in Connecticut where she has forged a good life for herself and her son. She's the manager of the local bank and a realtor. Unfortunately, her position at the bank has put her in the clutches of a local gangster and...

Stalking The Angel by Robert Crais My rating: 3 of 5 stars So, a cool blonde walks into the office of a sarcastic, wise-cracking private eye in Los Angeles and finds him upside down, at his ease, standing on his head. And we're off on another noir adventure with Elvis Cole, the "world's greatest detective" and his partner, Joe Pike, who never smiles, never takes his sunglasses off even at night, is a stone-cold killer and probable psychopath. Also, let us not forget Elvis' beer-drinking cat and his yellow Corvette and his office that is decorated with Disneyland collectibles. Quirky enough for you? That's our basic cast of characters. What are they up to in Stalking the Angel ? Well, that blonde who walked into Elvis' office is there, with her boss, to hire Elvis to find an ancient Japanese text that has gone missing. The book was being kept in the businessman's home safe, but it did not belong to him. It was on loan to him from some of his Japanese c...

The Monkey's Raincoat by Robert Crais My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book was recommended to me on Goodreads - one of those "since you read that, we think you might like this" deals. I don't always take notice of such recommendations, but Robert Crais' name rang a bell, so I decided to give it a try. This was the first book, published in 1987, in what is now a lengthy and continuing series featuring California private eye Elvis Cole and his partner Joe Pike. It is the very definition of noir, a "genre of fiction characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity." The writing and the two main characters recall Robert B. Parker and his characters Spenser and Hawk. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then somewhere Parker's shade must be smiling at the work of Crais and his success. And the series has been a big success right from the start. This book won several awards and later books in the series have been highly acclaimed and award...