So I got this book in a roundabout fashion: As part of the stocking stuffers for Christmas 2023, I bought the family Barnes and Noble gift cards, which I failed to stuff in their stockings in 2023 (they were full enough anyway), so I put them in the stockings for Christmas 2024 (where the stockings were less stuffed, so the deferred giving worked out better than it might have). My beautiful wife knew that this book was coming out this year (although the copyright date is 2024, it was not in book stores until February 2025). She read it right away–ah, gentle reader, I remember a time when I would buy a book by an author the day it came out and read it that night, but we are too far in the 21st century for me to do that much any more. After she read it, she put it into my office, and I put it in my unread stacks until after the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge. And, amazingly, I found it again shortly thereafter, so I picked it up.
This is an Elvis Cole / Joe Pike novel–it seems that Crais has abandoned writing other non-series books–and it’s definitely a throwback to late 20th century suspense writing. The style balances paragraphs of decription with dialog, which means good pacing with actual description in it and not just a script in a hardback. It’s almost 400 pages, but it doesn’t feel like it.
So, the plot: A young woman famous and rich from her online baking videos and growing media and baking empire contacts Elvis Cole to look for her father who disappeared ten years ago. He was declared dead after five years missing and a search by an investigation firm that Cole knows and respects. So he starts his investigation and discovers that someone in Rancha, the last place the father was seen, doesn’t want him investigating. Which leads to a brutal beatdown of Cole by multiple attackers (when he doesn’t give up) which allows multiple characters to say, “It looks like you got your ass kicked,” which was probably funnier to the author when he was writing the book than to me reading it.
The plot is a little convoluted–well, no more so than a Raymond Chandler book–and I don’t know that it hangs together seamlessly or without wrinkles–I thought a particular twist was coming which did not, and it ended up a little disappointing, but the execution and writing was refreshing enough that I’ll probably get the next Crais book for my wife right when it comes out, should another be forthcoming (it’s taking him several years to crank them out these days, so one of these will be the last, but hopefully not soon).
Which leads me to think maybe I should read all the Cole and then Cole/Pike books again. I’ve read Robert B. Parker’s early works several times, including some binge reads where I tore through all the works to a certain point in rapid succession, but that’s been twenty or twenty-five years–and I’m not especially inclined to do it again with the Spenser novels as they got longer and more hardback scripts having gained length but losing depth somewhere around that time. But Crais? I suspect I’d find they are pretty much quality throughout. But I have so many other books to read that I’m not eager to run through them again unless they accidentally end up on my to-read shelves again.
So: Recommended.
And I would be remiss if I did not mention that I own two copies of what might be Crais’s first published work–which is not The Monkey’s Raincoat. Which was expensive in paperback when we tried to find it twenty years ago.
