Product Description

It is fire season, and the hills of Los Angeles are burning. As the Police and Fire Departments evacuate the inhabitants, they find something no one expected: the days-old corpse of a middle-aged recluse who apparently committed suicide. Then comes an even more horrible discovery. Clutched in his lap is a photo album containing photographs of seven young women who have been murdered. Each photograph was taken only moments after the women were killed, and could only have been taken by the killer. One murder per year for seven years, their bodies found in different parts of the city. LAPD homicide detectives had never connected the seven murders. But now with the discovery of the 'death album' there is a link. Only one suspect had been charged in any of those cases but, with evidence supplied by Elvis Cole, in the end he walked free. That suspect was the suicide now discovered in the fire... and now the police are out for Cole...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12356 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
'Crais is on cracking form, with a fast moving plot with enough twists and turns to keep readers guessing' (GOOD BOOK GUIDE )

'A fast-paced satisfying thriller' (HUDDERSFIELD DAILY EXAMINER )

About the Author
Robert Crais is the author of numerous bestselling Elvis Cole and standalone novels, one of which, HOSTAGE, was made into a major film starring Bruce Willis. Crais has won many awards, and lives in L.A.

Customer Reviews

Another Tour de Force - Great Thriller Writing
What can I say? This is another great Robert Crais book, he just gets better as time goes by. It is also not as dark of the last few Cole/Pike books have been and deals more with a new case than what has happened in their lives previously.

Here we see them investigating the death of a serial killer. The problem is that Cole had cleared him of one of the murders 3 years before. The LAPD are blaming him for the following deaths but he maintains his intial findings were correct.

As he looks for answers things just get more and more complicated and people who could help are being killed. Paperwork goes missing from police files and, after declaring that the killer is dead, the LAPD seem to be investigating something and not telling anyone, including those in the force.

We have returned to a more care-free Cole with references made to his quirky side - the Mickey Mouse phone and Pinnochio clock making welcome returns. We also see more of his sarcastic wit materialising.

Pike is Pike. The supreme figure of primtive manhood that is always there, not letting anything ruffle him but gazing impassively at events that go on around him.

I really wish that we could have more than one book a year. That 12 month wait between books is very difficult. Yet I never want him to descend to Patterson thinness and poor quality. This year I've even rationed myself to stop me reading the entire book in a day.

Buy it and see what you may have missed.

Elvis is Alive and Well!
It's refreshing in these days of 400+ page crime thrillers, often padded out beyond their optimum length, to find a nice compact 273 page novel by a major writer.

But then again, Robert Crais is not your average crime novelist. He has the gift of setting a scene within a very short paragraph, and can easily sketch a memorable, living, breathing character in only a few lines. The upshot of this is that he crams an awful lot of plot into a relatively short space and this helps the action move at a cracking pace.

I'll not provide a synopsis - you can see one above, all I'll say is that while `Chasing Darkness' is by no means the best entry in the Cole and Pike series, it's still got plenty of good twists and the reader simply speeds through it. The prose is, as always, lean and spare and contains no excess wordage anywhere. This is the mark of all great American crime writers, and Crais is up there with all but the very, very best.

My one criticism is that it would have been nice to have had a bit more of Joe Pike in here - but then he did have a whole novel to himself last year with the excellent `The Watchman'. So `Chasing Darkness' is largely Elvis's show as he once again manages to out-think an entire police department and turn up vital information they've overlooked.

Although the murders he's investigating are harrowing and would be really dark in an other's hands, there's still plenty of light and shade. I particularly enjoyed the interplay between Cole and Carol Starkey, a homicide cop who moved from the bomb squad a while back after a long period of physical rehab (I would refer you to `Demolition Angel').

If you're a complete newcomer to Robert Crais, please be assured that you can read this without having caught the preceding books in the series. All you need to know is that Elvis is a private detective operating in LA. He has a wisecracking style (as do ALL private dicks! - but don't let that put you off!), a taciturn, hard-as-nails ex-marine sidekick named Joe Pike, and his office has a Mickey Mouse phone... oh, and the office tends to get trashed quite a lot!

All in all this was a very enjoyable read and is recommended to anyone who likes a good crime thriller

Deeply impressive
Every one of Robert Crais' novels since 1999's masterful L. A. Requiem (Elvis Cole Novels) has borne the burden of comparison to that book and often been found wanting. Chasing Darkness doesn't match or exceed LAR but - as with The Last Detective and The Two Minute Rule - when he is able to produce work of such high a standard, it seems almost churlish to keep harping on about past glories. Crais is one of the most exciting authors at work today, and we should really celebrate the way in which he has maintained such excellent focus over so many books (incredibly, this is his fifteenth) rather than dwelling on whatever flaws we can find.

For me, Crais is matched only by Michael Robotham for prose, which each book honing his written expression more and more finely, to the extent that desperately complex emotional states and ideas can be reduced to their purest essence in just a few words, which on occasion left my head spinning in amazement. There is no clutter in Chasing Darkness, the book is not one word longer than it needs to be, and for this the man's efficiency is to be admired: stripping away the flashbacks and multiple viewpoints that have characterised his later novels, Crais has made a welcome stylistic return to his earlier books with a smooth, focussed and sleekly-plotted thriller that easily ranks among his most propulsive and compelling. Central to this is the seamless fusion of the Cole and Starkey universes, with the wide supporting cast that Crais had established over the years (viva Eddie Ditko!) effortlessly fusing to form a coherent background for the first time (side note: is anyone else up for another Starkey-centric novel?).

Cole and Pike are old friends by now, and there is something immensely reassuring about slipping back into another story with them. There is, after 11 books with this central pair, a certain amount of peril that we can reasonably expect, but that doesn't stop Crais from exploring the darkness he promises up front in a realistic and occasionally unsettling way - the end of chapter 5, in particular, is a landmark in how Crais uses Cole to explore the darker aspects just below the surface. Also, for what to my mind is a first for Crais, there are questions deliberately left hanging at the end, the author purposely not reaching to conveniently explain everything away, which - in its incompleteness - actually makes the book more rounded and enjoyable. Congratulations, Mr. Crais, we're still hungry for more!