"L. A. REQUIEM" by Robert Crais (A+)

A literary masterpiece. My wife and I agree that this is the probably the finest private eye mystery that either of us has ever read. This is a well deserved compliment for this exceptional novel that delivers on all fronts. I was captivated from start to finish by every single aspect of this book, and I cannot praise it highly enough.

The writing is superb, the story is fascinating, and then we have the thrill of having Crais slowly peel back the layers of the enigmatic Joe Pike in periodic flashbacks to the days of his troubled youth with an abusive, drunken father and then to his later years as a LA police officer, where he resigned under a deep cloud of suspicion for possibly causing the death of his partner.

The way Crais has rolled Pike out in his novels has only served to enhance our curiosity about this unusual individual, who, on the surface, appears to be little more than a very efficient and cold-blooded killing machine. Crais masterfully segues from the present to the past and back to the present again in order to tie everything together into a complete, unified whole. The result ends up making Joe Pike one of the most fascinating characters in literature.

With all of the praise that I am heaping on this work, I would like to offer you this very strong proviso: Please do NOT select this as the first book that you read in the Elvis Cole series. The relationships in this series are just too complex, and you will miss out on far too much of their nuance if you start here! First read one or two of the other Crais books starring Pike and Cole, preferably those published before this one.

Like a gourmet dinner or a fine bottle of wine, treat this book like something for which you must be suitably prepared! Build up to it, look forward to reading it, anticipate this book as the apotheosis of the Cole series. Take my advice, and you won't be disappointed.

I know that a novel is a great read when I lie in bed late at night after having finished it and I wonder about its various characters, all of whom have come to life in my mind. I revisit what happened between them, and what might have happened if things had been different. I also wonder what happened to them after the end of the last chapter. But most of all, I wonder how in heaven's name is Crais going to carry all of this intensity forward to the next level in any of his new novels starring Cole and Pike. This will be my joy to find out, as there are at least three more in this series after the 1999 publication of this masterpiece.

I don't mean to overemphasize Joe Pike, as this novel is actually about Pike's partner, Elvis Cole. Once again we have the wisecracking Elvis Cole, "The World's Greatest Detective," doing his detecting as only he can do it, all the while offering his wry and witty observations every step of the way. You just have to love this guy. Cole has his name on the office door as the Elvis Cole Detective Agency, while Pike remains far in the background as his silent partner. It's a wonderful literary twofer relationship with the wisecracking Cole offsetting the enigmatic and mostly silent Pike.

Here Elvis Cole has a murder on his hands that ends up being far more than a case of simple homicide. Elvis receives a call from his long time partner, Joe Pike, asking for help as a personal favor for an old friend. The friend turns out to be a wealthy businessman known as Frank Garcia. Frank's daughter, Karen, is missing and the police won't respond yet because not enough time has elapsed. The mystery deepens when Elvis finds out that the reason that Joe and Frank are old friends is because Joe used to go out with Karen back in the turbulent days when he was on the LA police force and she was a college student.

When Karen's body is found by the side of a reservoir where she had been running, the elite LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division is called in to investigate. Her father has cultivated a lot of political pull over the years, and he is not shy about using his power to request that Cole and Pike be his personal liaison team with this division during the ongoing investigation.

His request is received with the utmost loathing by the members of the R-H division, which is where Joe Pike had been a cop years before. The officers still blame him for the death of Abel Wozniak, his partner at the time, and many of them would be only to happy to see the same fate befall Pike. While Elvis Cole is widely respected for his professionalism and his tenacity, the cops all know that the hated Pike is his partner.

Needless to say, Pike remains in the background while Cole is assigned to work with officer Samantha Dolan of the R-H division. Dolan initially views Cole as toxic waste dropped all over an investigation in which she is not the lead officer. Her views change when both she and Cole perceive that they are being frozen out of the more sensitive aspects of the case. They also observe the presence of another non-LAPD individual active in the investigation, and then Cole finds out that he is a member of the FBI. This is highly unusual for what had started out as an ordinary case of homicide.

More murders occur and clues are left which shockingly implicate Joe Pike as the murderer. The murderer seems to have an inside track as he is always one step ahead of the investigation. Is this an inside job or does someone else hate Pike more than the police officers? Unfortunately for Pike, every detective in the Robbery-Homicide Division would be thrilled to put him away for these murders, and they have an eyewitness placing him at the scene of one of the murders.

Meanwhile, Elvis also has relationship issues to deal with, since his paramour, Lucy Chenier, has moved out to LA with her son, Ben, to be with him. Lucy quickly finds out that she is associating with a man who has a high risk career where killing in self-defense and being murdered are daily occupational hazards. She is forced to realize that this may not be conducive either to the course of their love or the safety of her child.

Lucy is now the legal commentator for a local news channel, and she is not too happy to see Officer Samantha Dolan calling on Cole at all hours of the day and night. The two woman are both scrappers, and they take a visceral dislike to each other. But more troubling is her growing realization that Elvis will always be more loyal to Joe than to her. Published by Doubleday, 1999, 382 pages.