The Last Detective
by Robert Crais
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Book Summary Information
Author: Robert CraisEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-03-30
ISBN: 0345451902
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Book Reviews of The Last Detective
Book Review: An Entertaining Thriller
Summary: 5 Stars
Several centuries ago in his "Essays:Of Studies",Francis Bacon wrote:"Some books are to be tasted,others to be swallowed;and some few to be chewed and digested". Robert Crais's "The Last Detective" eaily falls in the realm of the third category with its explosive suspense,taut language and a cutting edge. This is a colossal suspense thriller that reflects the contemporary American author's exemplar of grouping inexplicable facets of suspense and gifting them the shape and size of words. This is a great thriller that would keep the reader on tenterhooks for a long,long time.
Elvis Cole is a private investigator who has made Los Angeles his abode and is spending some quite and refreshing days with Ben Chenier,his girlfriend Lucy Chenier's 10-year-old son. But all fantasies of smoothness and placidity escape out of the window when Ben mysteriously disappears from his house and is confirmed to be kidnapped. A beliguered mother,a hysterical father(Richard Chenier) and the distrust of the concerned authorities were never enough obstacles for Elvis to contend with in his race against time to recover the boy but when his past rushes catastrophically to his present and haunt him severely,Elvis comprehends that it's a trifle too much to undertake the adventure on his own and invokes Joe Pike,his trusted but enigmatic friend who also happens to be an ex-Marine.
Teaming up with Joe and the Juvenile Section detective Carol Starkey,Elvis decides to brush the kidnappers' threat aside and safely claw out Ben from their net. But it was never easy,it's never so and neither will it ever be and as Elvis turns over the pages of his very own history,he's mystified and aghast at his army days. He can't fathom the validity of the atrocity that the kidnappers allege he committed during the Vietnam War but time teaches him that it's all a decoy. Joe,Elvis and Carol piece out the puzzle but realise that they must be discreet and on top of teir game to master a criminal who's turning out to be an international criminal.....
This is Elvis and Joe's ninth case together and is really a genuine jewel for all fanatics of suspense thrillers. But "The Last Detective" isn't just a regular thriller steeped in one-dimensional perspective;Robert Crais lends,and lends successfully,a pluraristic touch to his novel. The maddening,and at times flattering,grief of a father whose son has been kidnapped,the petrified image of a mother whose child is amidst uncertain propositins and a man's desperation to undo his guilt are superbly mirrored in the principle characters of the book. Crais's graphic portrayal of the terrifying images of the Vietnam War framed in a woodwork of guilty reflections accentuates yet another dimension to his work.
"The Last Detective" is a fantastic mystery book deeply soaked in hair-raising adventure. Every word---and virtually every letter---sends around a rippling sense of awe and apprehension and there's not a line that's out of the context. Robert Crais is focussed,ambitious and clear in his work decipher a disdain of anticlimax when the solution comes out into the daylight before the end of the book,he should confess that the ation that follows thereafter augments to the book's charm. "The Last Detective" is a superbly drawn thriller,one that is to be read,and re-read and savour.
Summary of The Last Detective
P.I. Elvis Cole?s relationship with attorney Lucy Chenier is strained. Then the unthinkable happens. While Lucy is away on business and her ten-year-old son Ben is staying with Elvis, the boy vanishes without a trace. When the kidnappers call, it?s not for ransom, but for a promise to punish Cole for past sins he claims he didn?t commit. With the LAPD wrestling over the case, and the boy?s estranged father attempting to take control of the investigation, Cole vows to find Ben first. But Cole?s partner, Joe Pike, knows more about this case than he has said. Pike lives in a world where dangerous men commit crimes beyond all reckoning. Now, one of those men is alive and well in L.A.?and calling Elvis Cole to war. . . .Don't start reading The Last Detective with much on your calendar. This tense, satisfying thriller will glue you to your chair, as private eye Elvis Cole--the star of eight previous Robert Crais novels, prior to the Cole-less Demolition Angel and Hostage--faces his toughest case: the abduction of his girlfriend's son, 10-year-old Ben Chenier, who was staying with Elvis when he was snatched.
Panic at Ben's disappearance turns to terror when the kidnapper phones to reveal his apparent motive, a dark secret from Elvis's past. But the plot thickens and twists, and then twists again, as Elvis and his longtime buddy, tough guy Joe Pike, race the clock against a group of villains as sinister as they are capable. The author mixes Elvis's first-person narration with third-person sections that describe other points of view--a risky technique, but Crais makes it work. He also does a fine job resurrecting the wisecracking Elvis of earlier books while imbuing him with a new depth and darkness.
This dazzlingly plotted, crisply told story is threaded with real detection (what a rarity!) and peopled by characters you can't help but care about--including Carol Starkey, the haunted bomb-squad cop from Demolition Angel, who's now a juvenile-abduction detective. Crais has long been getting better with each book, and The Last Detective continues the pattern. --Nicholas H. Allison
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