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Chasing Darkness: An Elvis Cole Novel

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Elvis Cole is Back--In a Desperate Fight to Clear his Name...

It's fire season, and the hills of Los Angeles are burning. When police and fire department personnel rush door to door in a frenzied evacuation effort, they discover the week-old corpse of an apparent suicide. But the gunshot victim is less gruesome than what they find in his lap: a photo album of seven brutally murdered young women -- one per year, for seven years. And when the suicide victim is identified as a former suspect in one of the murders, the news turns Elvis Cole's world upside down.

Three years earlier Lionel Byrd was brought to trial for the murder of a female prostitute named Yvonne Bennett. A taped confession coerced by the police inspired a prominent defense attorney to take Byrd's case, and Elvis Cole was hired to investigate. It was Cole's eleventh-hour discovery of an exculpatory videotape that allowed Lionel Byrd to walk free. Elvis was hailed as a hero.

But the discovery of the death album in Byrd's lap now brands Elvis as an unwitting accomplice to murder. Captured in photographs that could only have been taken by the murderer, Yvonne Bennett was the fifth of the seven victims -- two more young women were murdered after Lionel Byrd walked free. So Elvis can't help but wonder -- did he, Elvis Cole, cost two more young women their lives?

Shut out of the investigation by a special LAPD task force determined to close the case, Elvis Cole and Joe Pike desperately fight to uncover the truth about Lionel Byrd and his nightmare album of death -- a truth hidden by lies, politics, and corruption in a world where nothing is what it seems to be.

Chasing Darkness is a blistering thriller from the bestselling author who sets the standard for intense, powerful crime writing.


PRODUCT DESCRIPTIONS:

Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780743281645
ISBN: 0743281640
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2008-07-01
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Studio: Simon & Schuster


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CUSTOMER REVIEWS:

A quick, entertaining read - but there's a hole in the plot that I found hard to ignore -
I'm not sure why, but before Chasing Darkness, I hadn't read anything by Robert Crais. I read a fair amount of crime fiction and Crais is one of the better known authors in the genre so it is strange that I hadn't read anything by him.

For the most part I enjoyed the novel. I liked the Elvis Cole character and I appreciated that this PI actually does a reasonable amount of detecting. I find that a lot of the time the PI's in this type of novel tend to stumble onto the solution of a crime rather than actually solving anything.

I gather this is not the best example of the author's work (I have been meaning to read Monkey's Raincoat & LA Requiem - but haven't yet). I may not be a regular reader of the author, but even I can tell that Crais is just going through the motions here. The solution to this mystery when revealed has a pretty significant hole in its logic and there are some annoying unresolved issues that seem to have been forgotten by the author.

All in all, I found Chasing Darkness to be a quick, entertaining read. It's not great, but an enjoyable diversion. I plan to read one of his earlier novels so that I can experience Crais at his best. Even so, based on this effort and even if he is underperforming here (which I assume he is) he's still an author worth reading.

Back On Track -
There seems to be a common thread in the opinions about Crais's Elvis Cole novels; and that is that Cole and his pal, Joe Pike, have lost something since the early novels. Less swagger, not so in-your-face, whatever. Well I for one think this latest novel, Chasing Darkness, is a giant step back in the right direction. Cole seems to have put on his Monkey's Raincoat in this one. Well worth the read.

What happened at the end? -
Every part of the plot is excellent. You won't have any inklings who is the bad guy. You'll know for sure since the beginning who's not the bad guy. But at the end the book's plot is missing something big time.

This One's All Elvis, or nearly so -
Robert Crais is one of my fav authors. He can weave a spell binding suspense that keeps you turning pages. In Chasing Darkness, Elvis is stunned to learn the man he proved innocent of killing a young woman may have been guilty. In fact, he may have killed more young women. Cole thinks his original investigation was sound. He and his partner, the enigmatic Joe Pike set off to find out who the real killer is. To solve the case they must cut though a web of corruption and heavy-duty LAPD politics. When the killer is finally revealed in the book's last pages, it's a shocker.

It's a classic sleuth novel where Cole does the kind of grunt, door-to-door dectective work that breaks open real life cases. As in his more recent novels in the series, Crais has Elvis leaving behind his high-jinx, wise-cracking days. This is a more tempered Elvis Cole.

Carol Starkey was in the novel and I would've liked to have seen more of her. I definitely would like to see more Joe Pike. I'm not happy with Crais' recent trend to give us less of Pike. I was happy to see Lucy fading from the picture, though I do miss her son.

Elvis Cole Loses His Funny Bone -
Comedy is tough to write, but Robert Crais used to be the master of comedic detectives in his early Elvis Cole books. That humor has become less prevalent as the series has gotten older, and while the humor and laughs I used to get from the Cole series are missed, Crais still delivers a top-notch mystery. This is a pretty straightforward detective novel, but the quirkiness of Joe Pike and an overall good plot carry this effort. I don't like the brooding Elvis Cole as much as I liked the fast-talking funny version, but I'll be back for more.

Recommended, but look elsewhere for some laughs.