My beautiful wife read this book before I did, relying on a library copy to keep her up to date with the comings and goings of Cole and Pike. Me, I bought the book to complete my enrollment with the Book of the Month Club. She expressed some disappointment with it which, ultimately, I think was unwarranted.
In it, Cole and Pike go back to an earlier case of Cole’s: a fellow that Cole cleared of a murder charge dies from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound with a photo album of dead people in it. The photographs are taken moments after the deaths of the individuals, and the book includes the murder victim from the previous case. Cole is sure that the dead man didn’t kill the woman from his case, so he looks into the man’s death and finds a special police task force that might be protecting a political figure.
The book uses a couple of things common to Robert B. Parker’s writing: the tough narrator and the tougher sidekick and the return to previous stories. However, Crais’s writing still includes prose between the dialog, so Crais executes better than Parker anytime after, say, 1990.
The ending features a twist and a simple resolution that one could see a mile away, post-twist that is. Crais also incorporates some foreshadowing that’s obvious as foreshadowing, but the meaning of the foreshadowing only becomes clear with the twist.
A good book overall and one that keeps me interested in the series, which makes it one of two contemporary series I appreciate (Sandford’s Lucas Davenport being the other).
