To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
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 […]
I bought this book for my beautiful wife for Christmas, so I don’t get to put it onto my read shelves, although it would not surprise me if a secondhand copy does not end up over there. After all, I have a pretty complete set starting with The Monkey’s Raincoat, Crais’ first Elvis Cole novel […]
I was surprised and pleased to find a Robert Crais book on my to-read shelves; I just read A Dangerous Man, which is relatively new. How is it that a Crais book has languished on my to-read shelves for so long? Turns out, it has probably not. I read this book when it was new […]
It’s very rare for me to read a book written in the last couple of years, so it says something when I read a book in its week of release. Robert Crais is the only author that can claim that honor, slight that it be. Well, if you search for Robert Crais on this blog, […]
This book has been on my to-read shelf for a while, and I don’t know why. I enjoy Robert Crais’ books more than a lot of the stuff I read. How big of a fan am I? I once spent an afternoon going through microfiche old PDFs of Spider-Man comic books to find the one […]
This book is not an Cole/Pike book. It’s more along the lines of Demolition Angel, wherein the book focuses on a member of a branch of the police force that’s not your ordinary detective or street cop. In Demolition Angel, it was a member of the bomb squad. In this case, it’s the K9 unit. […]
This book is the second of three I received for Christmas from my beautiful wife, and it actually precedes The Sentry, but the events within the books are not so developmentally tied that you can really tell. Crais is keeping the novels episodic enough that you can pick them up in pretty much any order. […]
I admit, I fall behind on the Robert Crais reading. I don’t know why I haven’t been seeking out his books at the library like I have John Sandford’s (until recently). But I haven’t. I read Chasing Darkness over four years ago. But when I fall behind, my beautiful wife is there to provide me […]
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 […]
This book is another Joe Pike book (like L.A. Reqiuem, I think). As you know, gentle reader, I have read and reported upon all of Robert Crais’s work on this blog. I started out liking him with his early stuff, but later got a little bored with the “World’s Greatest Detective” schtick of Elvis Cole. […]
Well, it’s been a year and a half since I read a Robert Crais novel (The Forgotten Man). I’d even forgotten this book existed, since it was behind a wall of unread books on my to read shelves. Now that I have a couple extra book cases, I have spread these books out, and it […]
This book is the latest in the Elvis Cole novels by Robert Crais; he released it just last month. As a later Elvis Cole novel, it features all the hallmarks of the Cole novels: A woman character who falls madly in love with Cole, who is oblivious because Cole is pining for Lucy Chenier, and […]
I would have better enjoyed this book, like the others later in the Elvis Cole series, had I not read the first ones in the series. That is, if I had not immediately read the books and thought I’d find a series in the tradition of Chandler/MacDonald/Parker. Instead, the books have petered into a rather […]
This book finally makes good use of the multiple points of view that Crais has been doing for the last couple of novels. This time, though, he goes a little further and adjusts the timeline, so when one point of view leaves off at a climactic moment, another will pick up a couple of minutes […]
There you go. It’s remarkable how, if you read enough of an author, particularly if you read them consecutively, you can pick up on the author’s particular speech habits and how they translate into the author’s work so that many different characters say the same thing. Robert B. Parker fans know about his particular tics, […]
It’s a tough series. I liked the first books, but somewhere my enjoyment peaked, and I’ve enjoyed succeeding novels less. L.A. Requiem continues the trend. Not only does it have personal life melodrama for the detective, but it also features combinations of point-of-view and narrators that rather detract from the story. Elvis Cole tells the […]
This is another book in the Elvis Cole series, and as with the last one, it’s moving quite to the series. Entire chapters and subplots do not relate back to the main plot of the book and carry on their own see-you-next-book cliff hangers. While my beautiful wife likes this sort of thing, I find […]
This book is where the Elvis Cole books become an obvious series, and that’s not a good thing for a standalone novel. The plot revolves around Elvis Cole’s experience as part of a high-profile defense team of a wealth restauranteur whose wife’s body is found after she was beaten to death. Although investigators find the […]
This book features Elvis Cole working for an adopted starlet who’s interested in finding her natural parents in Louisiana. When Cole travels to Louisiana, he discovers that her past is shrouded in mystery, mayhem, and the secrets of a small town. Enough of the back of the book stuff. Another good Elvis Cole book, but […]
I have this book in hardback, but that means instead of bending paperback covers, I got blue ink on my hands from the spine of the de-dustjacketed book. I guess it was worth it. Elvis Cole receives a visit from a damsel in distress who thinks that her fiance, a cop with an elite undercover […]