Alaska Employment Law

To my list of favorite writers of modern police procedurals (Michael Connelly and James Lee Burke), I must now add Robert Crais, having made my way through The Forgotten Man, The Two Minute Rule, The Watchman, and The Last Detective this summer.

What links these three writers together? Their protagonists are morally complex characters with difficult pasts, who struggle with their demons even as they pursue the bad guys. And they often have buddies who are not hesitant about breaking the law in the interests of, shall we say, moral clarity. Crais’s man is Elvis Cole, a Vietnam vet, now a private investigator in Los Angeles, whose mother, on one of those rare occasions when she was actually around, changed his name to Elvis when he was six years old, mostly because she liked the way it sounded. Playing Keith to Elvis’s Mick (talk about mixing my metaphors) is Joe Pike, a fearless man of exceedingly few words but unbending loyalty to Mr. Cole. And even Joe Pike, emotionally speaking, is a prisoner of his own indomitability.

Of the four books I have noted, start with The Last Detective, a great read about a kidnapped child, although the ending is perhaps prolonged and a little florid. That leads nicely into The Forgotten Man, in which a murder victim claims to be Elvis’s long lost father. The Two Minute Rule is a non-Elvis book, starring Max Holman, an ex-con seeking reconciliation with his estranged son, a cop who is implicated in police corruption; it’s good. And The Watchman is Joe Pike, hired to protect a young and foolish heiress, Conner Barkley, who is relentlessly hunted by a succession of thoroughly evil hit men, apparently for being a witness to something the significance of which is hidden to her, and to us. In many ways the Joe Pike book was the most enjoyable. Needless to say, these are like potato chips. Bet you can’t read just one.

Incidentally, I read The Last Detective on my shiny new Amazon Kindle, which I will eventually get around to reviewing.