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Summary
Summary
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Investigator Elvis Cole and his partner Joe Pike take on the deadliest case of their lives in the new masterpiece of suspense from #1 New York Times -bestselling author Robert Crais.
It seemed like a simple case--before the bodies started piling up...
When single-mother Devon Connor hires Elvis Cole, it's because her troubled teenage son Tyson is flashing cash and she's afraid he's dealing drugs. But the truth is devastatingly different. With two others, he's been responsible for a string of high-end burglaries, a crime spree that takes a deadly turn when one of them is murdered and Tyson and his girlfriend disappear.
They stole the wrong thing from the wrong man, and, determined to get it back, he has hired two men who are smart and brutal and the best at what they do.
To even the odds, Cole brings in his friend Joe Pike, but even the two of them together may be overmatched. The police don't want them anywhere near the investigation, the teenagers refuse to be found, and the hired killers are leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. Pretty soon, they'll find out everything they need to know to track the kids down--and then nothing that Elvis or Joe can do may make any difference. It might even get them killed.
Author Notes
Robert Crais was born in 1953 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Before becoming a writer, he was a mechanical engineer. In 1976, he began writing scripts for television series including Miami Vice, Cagney and Lacey, and Hill Street Blues. He is the author of the Elvis Cole series and the Joe Pike series. The Monkey's Raincoat won the Anthony and Macavity Awards in 1988. In 2005, his novel Hostage was adapted into a movie starring Bruce Willis. He is the 2006 recipient of the Ross Macdonald Literary Award. In 2017 his title, The First Rule, made the IBook Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In bestseller Crais's taut 17th thriller to feature L.A. PI Elvis Cole and his cryptic sidekick, Joe Pike (after 2015's The Promise), frantic mom Devin Connor hires Elvis to find out why her teenage son, Tyson, has a mountain of expensive clothing, cash, and a $40,000 Rolex hidden in his bedroom. It turns out that Tyson is part of a trio that has robbed 18 homes. But before Tyson can agree to surrender himself, co-robber Alec turns up dead-a victim of Harvey and Stemms, two eccentric hit men. They know the kids have stolen a laptop coded with valuable information and will joyfully kill to recover it. Panicked, Tyson goes off the grid with his girlfriend and fellow thief, Amber. Now Elvis, aided by the implacable Pike, must find the teens before Harvey and Stemms do. The empathic Elvis takes center stage, with just enough hard-boiled Pike to season the mayhem. The plot isn't Crais's most inventive, but it's still expertly crafted. Agent: Aaron Priest, Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency. (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Devon Connor's 17-year-old son, Tyson, suddenly seems flush with cash and sporting what appears to be a Rolex. Devon is worried that Tyson may be dealing drugs and hires PI Elvis Cole to find out. Meanwhile, Harvey and Stemms, deadly criminals for hire, are looking for a laptop with incriminating evidence about a murder committed by an extraordinarily wealthy Southern California family. In short order, Cole learns that the Rolex is part of the haul Tyson and two friends made in a series of robberies. The laptop was one of many the teenage criminals stole. With Tyson on the run, Harvey and Stemms inch ever closer leaving carnage in their wake to finding the teen and his partners. Lurking in the shadows and covering Elvis' back is his buddy Joe Pike, who, on a scale of dangerous guys, makes Harvey and Stemms look like the Bobbsey twins. Crais, who has a Grandmaster Award from the Mystery Writers of America, always delivers riveting crime fiction while somehow offering something unique in every novel. Here it's the surprisingly interesting, Tarantino-like conversations between Harvey and Stemms as they plan their next deadly steps. More fantastic reading from a perennial A-lister who belongs on every crime fan's TBR list.--Lukowsky, Wes Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
INSPECTOR IAN RUTLEDGE haunts Charles Todd's mysteries like an unhappy ghost, wandering among the living but more at home among the dead. In THE GATEKEEPER (Morrow, $26.99), the shellshocked veteran of World War I is investigating a murder in Wolfpit, a village that once served as a holding pen for trapped wolves. But by the winter of 1920 the place has evolved into a comfortable cage for trapped souls, notably the wounded veterans and grieving widows who make up much of its shrunken population. "This wasn't the usual village murder," Rutledge notes when Stephen Wentworth, the proprietor of the town's bookstore, is shot dead by a stranger who accosts him as he's driving along a country road in the dark of night. According to a note left in the inspector's hotel room, "Stephen Wentworth is a murderer. He got what he deserved." Not even his mother has a kind word for him. "He was always a disappointing child," she tells Rutledge, "and he grew into a disappointing man." Every decent detective feels obliged to bring about justice on behalf of a murder victim. Here Rutledge is honor bound to restore the good name of a young man who may not have been guilty of the homicide that, even in death, hangs over his head. And the only way to do that is to find the real killer. As always in this singular series, the mother-and-son team who write as Charles Todd position their mystery within the broader context of a nation frozen in postwar depression. Viewing the world through Rutledge's eyes, we can't help noticing that there are very few able-bodied young men left in the village. Even young women are in scant supply, many having been lured to the cities by the well-paid work offered by factories in need of laborers while the men were off on the battlefield. The melancholy tone that distinguishes the Rutledge series is a reminder that war never ends for the families and friends of lost loved ones. It just retreats into the shadows. ELVIS cole is the kind of private detective a woman would turn to if her teenage son started wearing a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch that retails for $40,000. In THE WANTED (Putnam, $28), Robert Crais's superior specimen of tough-guy hero rides to the rescue of a single mother, Devon Connor, who's worried sick about 17-year-old Tyson. Cole quickly determines that the kid is running with some "crash-and-burn children" whose wealthy Los Angeles parents have no idea that their offspring have committed a string of burglaries and are selling the goods at the Venice flea market. Unfortunately, a laptop they've stolen is worth money and human lives to someone who has sent a pair of hired guns to retrieve it. After they murder one of the young thieves, the others become Cole's headache. Crais writes choice dialogue for those hired guns, Harvey and Stemms. In fact, their heated discussion about the shower scene in "Psycho" is so entertaining you wish they didn't have to go the way of all secondary characters in hard-boiled crime novels and, you know, die. PARADISE, ACCORDING to Frank Tallis in MEPHISTO WALTZ (Pegasus, $25.95), is an exact replica of early-20th-century Vienna, "where celestial coffeehouses lined the principal approaches to the Pearly Gates." That would make angels of the psychoanalyst Dr. Max Liebermann and his friend, Detective Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt, the brainy sleuths in Tallis's erudite series of historical mysteries. He seizes on the singular appeal of this period, from the luscious apfelschmarrn and topfenstrudel served in the fashionable cafes to the lively intellectual discourse of their learned patrons. ("The Viennese were so highly strung, so nervous, even symphonies got them agitated.") A disfigured corpse discovered in the workshop of a derelict piano manufacturer leads to revelations about the city's dark side, an underworld of anarchists plotting to assassinate Emperor Franz Josef. A woman who has built a bombmaking factory in her basement makes a memorable appearance, as does Dr. Sigmund Freud, who advances the argument that "a political party is just another form of crowd" and politicians are dangerous because they're "buoyed up by the people who stand behind them, carried forward on waves of feeling." ILKA JENSEN IS nothing if not resourceful. In the first novel in Sara Blaedel's new series, THE UNDERTAKER'S DAUGHTER (Grand Central, $26), Jensen leaves her home in Copenhagen and flies to Racine, Wis., after her estranged father leaves her an undertaking business in his will. On her first day, Jensen must add pet dogs to the plans for a funeral service, pick up a severely mangled body at the morgue ("Bring along some extra plastic. It sounds like it might be a mess") and come up with $60,000 to keep the I.R.S. from freezing her assets. To make this new life complete, the police inform her that one of the bodies in her freezer is probably a murderer. Most amateur sleuths hold down professional jobs to support their unofficial detective work. Blaedel has come up with an especially challenging occupation for Jensen, but this 6-foot-tall Viking goddess is strong enough to carry it all by herself. Marilyn STASIO has covered crime fiction for the Book Review since 1988. Her column appears twice a month.
Guardian Review
After an eight-year hiatus Henry Porter is back with Firefly (Quercus, £14.99), in which a 13-year-old boy has escaped from the refugee camps in Greece and is on a dangerous odyssey to Germany and freedom. But he has knowledge that has put him in the firing line of an Islamic State terrorist cell; they are determined that he must die before he can reveal details of operations in Europe. MI6 operative Luc Samson is tasked with tracking down the boy (codenamed Firefly), using his expertise in Arabic to win over his terrified charge and save him from his ruthless pursuers. Firefly marks the welcome return to fiction of a writer and journalist who has often decried the surveillance society. And its perhaps his concern for our loss of personal freedom that drives this galvanic novel: its not the all-seeing eyes of the security services that will prevent a large-scale atrocity, but the actions of one good man, Samson. With its vivid portrait of the flood of refugees moving west from Macedonia, Serbia and Turkey, the book could not be more timely, and Porters sympathy for the dispossessed is as cogent here as his skill at sustaining narrative tension. Political concerns are also at the heart of Darling by Rachel Edwards (4th Estate, £12.99), which focuses on the EU referendum result and its effect on levels of racism in the UK. Shortly after the vote to leave, the eponymous narrator gets abuse in the street for the colour of her skin. She is defended by another single parent, a white widower called Thomas. The couple develop a relationship and marry, but Thomass teenage daughter, Lola, has no affection for her new black stepmother, and the conflict between the two has disastrous consequences: a prologue tells us one of the characters will die. But which one? The writing here is unvarnished but persuasive, and Edwards societal concerns are threaded through her novel without cut-and-dried judgments. Some readers may balk at the way she makes virtually every character irritating no easy sympathy is invited for Darling herself, with her faux-ingratiating tone of voice, while Lola has all the off-putting characteristics of a resentful teenager. There is clandestine evil at the heart of the book, treated with ambiguity rather than straightforward condemnation. The response to the three Raj-set novels of Abir Mukherjee has been one of unalloyed praise, not least for the fact that these exuberant narratives are so nuanced in their treatment of that era. Emotionally damaged English policeman Sam Wyndham encounters trouble in 1920s India alongside his intuitive Sergeant Surrender-not Banerjee, who may seem to be the Watson to Wyndhams Holmes, but is actually the more perceptive of the two. Smoke and Ashes (Harvill Secker, £12.99) has Wyndham struggling with the opium addiction he is obliged to keep hidden. Less able this time to rely on Banerjee, he becomes involved with two cases one of which, in a drugged stupor, he himself staggers across where the bodies have been mutilated in ritualistic fashion. Rendering the investigation less important, meanwhile, are seismic events connected with the struggle for Indian independence. As in previous books, it is the flamboyant evocation of 1920s Calcutta that makes this such a mesmerising read. Charles Cummings The Man Between (HarperCollins, £14.99) continues the authors steady upwards trajectory; he will soon be snapping at the heels of such masters as John le Carré and Gerald Seymour. In this standalone thriller naive novelist Kit Carradine is drawn into the duplicitous world of espionage. Carradine, seduced by what he sees as the glamour of British intelligence, is more than ready to take on the task of travelling to Morocco to track down Lara Bartok, an enigmatic fugitive who is linked to global terrorism. She has been a key figure in Resurrection, a Baader-Meinhof- like group that kidnaps and murders rightwing politicians and journalists (an early victim here is a female journalist who bears a resemblance to a controversial UK pundit). Inevitably, Carradine is attracted to the seductive Lara and is forced into a fateful decision. Barbara Nadels distinctive Istanbul-set Inspector Ikmen thrillers combine brightly coloured scene setting with deliciously tortuous plots the resourceful Ikmen is always struggling with intractable cases. In Incorruptible (Headline, £20.99), the body of a young woman has been found crammed into a dustbin and festooned with cut flowers. Ikmen discovers that she was hailed as the blessed woman, apparently cured of cancer by a miracle and subsequently declared a messenger of the Virgin Mary. This beatific Christian reputation had not endeared her to the Muslim community, and many wanted her dead. But is there something else in her family history that has brought about her murder? Nadel has never shied away from contentious issues, and her provocative edginess makes this a forceful entry in the series. Robert Crais honed his craft on seminal American TV cop shows, notably Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice, and like his inspiration Raymond Chandler, he uses Los Angeles as a deliriously kaleidoscopic backdrop for his writing. His sardonic private eye Elvis Cole is securely fixed in the constellation of literary detectives, as is Craiss other recurring character, the hard-as-nails Joe Pike. In The Wanted (Simon & Schuster, £14.99), Tyson, a teenage burglar of upmarket homes, is being tracked by two brutal murderers, keen to retrieve a stolen laptop. Cole and Pike are hired by the mother of the missing boy to find him, and soon both duos are converging on Tyson with violent results. Not vintage Crais, perhaps, but he still expertly delivers his customary modern-day riff on the 1940s hardboiled idiom. - Barry Forshaw.
Kirkus Review
In the latest Elvis Cole book, a teenager involved in a series of high-end burglaries is pursued by a murderous, wisecracking duopossibly dirty copshired to recover a stolen laptop.Along with his dicey new friends, Alec and Amber, with whom he's smitten, 17-year-old Valley boy Tyson Connor has been stashing away tens of thousands of dollars from selling stolen items, including watches and jewelry. His mother, Devon, knows he's in some kind of trouble but thinks he may be dealing drugs. After Tyson disappears, she hires Cole to find him. The coldblooded bad guys don't hesitate to kill people, including a busboy who gave them information about Alec and Amber and an elderly regular at a flea market where the young crooks sold their loot. With the LA cops on his case, as usual, and his regular associate Joe Pike providing backup, the private eye and Devon are able to make contact with Tyson electronically. When Devon texts her son that Alec has been murdered, Amber convinces him that his mom is making up stories to get him backbut a text from Cole about the flea-market lady's death, coupled with some Googling, makes Tyson wonder. Among West Coast mystery writers, none is more reliable than Crais, who is in excellent form here. Though he makes his villains a bit too much of a comedy duothe violence is oddly muted as a resultit's difficult to resist an exchange in which they argue over the use of the music from the shower scene in Psycho as a ringtone.In his 21st book, Los Angeles ace Crais (The Promise, 2015, etc.) extends his streak of sharp, enjoyable thrillers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Single mom Devon Connor calls Elvis Cole to investigate why her son, Tyson, has a $40,000 watch and wads of cash. The PI soon discovers Tyson and two friends committed a string of high end-home burglaries and attempts to convince Devon that her son should turn himself in. Meanwhile, two ruthless, highly intelligent, and competent killers named Harvey and Stemms chase Tyson and his pals, leaving a trail of bodies as they seek to recover information believed to be hidden on a laptop stolen by the teens. As the body count rises, Elvis calls in Joe Pike as reinforcement. This follow-up to The Promise adroitly spins a treatise on relations between mothers and sons, fathers and sons, and bonds of friendship, nestled within a hair-raising chase between cold-blooded murderers and naïve adolescents. Crais's trademark humor and thoroughly accurate, genuine depictions of human interactions make this one of his best yet. The mutual respect and "buddy" admiration between Harvey and Stemms mirrors that between Elvis and Joe. A tremendously rewarding climax and touching epilog conclude with the nurturing of another treasured connection. Verdict Crais delivers another highly and deeply satisfying page-turner that will please his many fans.-Jeffrey W. Hunter, Royal Oak, MI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.