Robert Crais is back on the top of his game in this novel starring Joe Pike with Elvis Cole along for added attraction. Here Crais' popular anti-hero evidences unexpected vulnerability towards a rare woman who touches his heart. As the story develops, Pike finds out that she may not be who she purports herself to be, and how he deals with his feelings towards her as events unfold adds a deep and very pleasing emotional subtext to the plot. 

Television's loss is our gain, for Crais first found national success when he moved to Hollywood in 1976 and began writing scripts for some of the great hits of the day (and some of my favorite television shows) including "Hill Street Blues," "Cagney and Lacey," "Quincy," "Miami Vice," and "L.A. Law." Additional work included scripting television series pilots and movies of the week, but he is most proud of his four hour NBC mini-series, "Cross of Fire," which chronicled the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s. 

After almost a decade having to deal with the pressure of working under rigid time constraints, Crais left the Hollywood business to explore themes he couldn't write for television. His first Elvis Cole novel, "The Monkey's Raincoat" (a personal favorite) was published in 1987. His major literary influences are, among others, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and Robert B. Parker. Since the Eighties he has written eighteen novels and in the process picked up five Shamus Awards, two Edgar Awards, one Anthony Award, and one Macavity Award for his writing, with his outstanding 1999 novel, "L.A. Requiem" (another personal favorite) being the most honored. 

By the way, Crais is on record as stating that he will never allow the character of Joe Pike to be licensed for either television or for the movies. I give him a lot of credit for doing this, for our imaginations will always be better than some Hollywood hunk. Currently, Crais lives in the Santa Monica mountains with his family, three cats, and many thousands of books, and, when not writing, he is an active aerobatic pilot, gourmet cook, and backpacker. Like most authors, Crais features stories that take place in locales familiar to him. While he now lives in California, the site of most of his stories, he grew up in Louisiana, so a few of his stories take place in that state or feature a New Orleans flavor as does this novel.

After penning numerous novels featuring Elvis Cole with Joe Pike being introduced later as a secondary character, Crais wrote the first Joe Pike novel, "The Watchman," only recently in 2007. With his fans clamoring for more, he has since written two Joe Pike novels with this being the third in the series. A new Robert Crais novel starring Joe Pike is always a treat, but a new novel featuring both Pike and Cole together is a cause for celebration for us fans of these two iconic detectives. 

Though partners, Joe and Elvis are quite different in their personalities, but not in their professionalism nor in their effectiveness. Elvis Cole, a former Army Ranger, is charming, lighthearted, and quick with the quips, while Joe Pike, a former Marine and ex-mercenary for hire, is a taciturn, fearsome individual with large red, forward facing arrows tattooed on his deltoids. He makes for a frightening presence since he walks the walk as a man of action who becomes a deadly killing machine when he tracks his target like a black panther. 

In this novel he meets with another dangerous ex-mercenary, and the latter asks Pike if they had ever crossed paths. "I don't think so," Joe answers. The other asks, "Why?" And Pike answers with conviction and completely self assured confidence, "Because you'd be dead," and he means it.

Since their careers will not allow for any long term relationships, Elvis Cole is probably the only friend that Joe Pike has in the world. The two have been together so long that they trust each other implicitly and fit together like hand in glove when it comes to making their move, as they will here against an assassin hired by the Bolivian drug cartel to ice a man for double dealing them.

It is just another day when Pike stops to gas up his Jeep, and he notices that one of his tires is three pounds too low. While taking the extra time to fill up the tire, he observes with the eyes of a former LA cop two Latino gang bangers casing the stores across the street. His interest  aroused, he studies them as they pass a clothing store and then enter a small sandwich shop called Wilson's Take Out - Po'boys & Sandwiches.

To the chagrin of another waiting customer, he leaves his Jeep at the gas pump and walks into the store, interrupting a beating in the process. A middle aged man later identified as Wilson Smith is cowering on the floor trying to protect himself from the blows. The gang bangers tell Pike to get lost, but instead he charges in and breaks the arm of one of them, at which point the other takes off. 

While grateful, Wilson Smith is surprisingly uncooperative with both Pike and the police officers who arrive to interview both of them, claiming if not those two, then other gang bangers will return to his small shop in Venice. The police assume the gang bangers, members of the Latino Venice Trece Gang, were in the process of setting up a protection racket, but Pike is not so sure. 

Pike's rescue of Wilson Smith assumes an entirely different shading when his niece, Dru Rayne, shows up to clean the restaurant after he leaves for the hospital. Pike is immediately attracted to her, so he gives her his private cell phone number in case she should need help in the future. On a lunch date shortly thereafter she will tell Pike that she and her uncle had moved to California five years earlier after having lost everything in Hurricane Katrina.  

The plot thickens when FBI agents working in conjunction with two LA police detectives, who don't like Pike as a former rogue cop, all tell him to back off his efforts to protect Dru and her uncle because they are trying to set up a sting on the Venice Trece gang. Something isn't right when everyone, including Wilson Smith and Dru Rayne herself, tell Pike to leave them alone when his every instinct is to protect the first woman who has touched his heart in years. Then one day the store is trashed and Dru and Wilson disappear without  a trace. Clues will point to a new, much more dangerous player on the scene, but why? 

This novel is about as good as they come with two minor caveats. First, the story opens with a strange and rather confusing first chapter taking place in New Orleans in which two of the characters have to be inferred from the events, something I was not prepared to do until much later in the novel. In effect, I felt like I was dropped into the deep end of the pool, figuratively speaking, without having these characters or the foundation of the plot better introduced. Secondly, the friendly banter between Joe Pike and Elvis Cole or even Elvis Cole and anyone else is largely missing from this novel as it has a tone much darker than previous Crais stories. I missed that, but it is a minor quibble. 2011, G. Putnam's Sons, 320 pages.