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The Forgotten Man

by Robert Crais

In The Forgotten Man, Robert Crais features his characters Elvis Cole and Joe Pike – both Private Eyes and very good at what they do. Although Mr. Crais idealized Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald and Robert Parker (among others), his writing is hardly a composite of theirs: Robert Crais stands quite alone, a very sound equal to any of them. Mr. Crais work is always absorbing, and The Forgotten Man is a powerful tale bringing his protagonist nearer and nearer to a psychotic killer – a story immersing you in suspense – a page-turner – something at which Mr. Crais is adept.

Robert Crais wisely sets his tales about Elvis and Joe in the environs with which he's most familiar – the Los Angeles Basin. But the prologue introducing the story takes us outside the city to Temeucula. This small town isn't too far away from L.A., but it's mostly in the desert, with very little green. The police, summoned by neighbors, find two adults brutally murdered along with their son. Somehow the murderer missed the four-year-old girl.

Another murder – this one in an alley located in downtown Los Angeles (which anyone knows who's been there that downtown can hardly be called the nicer section) – and Elvis is rooted out of a sound sleep by a female police officer who wants him to come identify the body. It seems that just before he died, Detective Kelly Diaz of the LAPD heard him ask for Elvis – and claimed he was Elvis' father. Elvis father had disappeared a long time ago, so naturally he was intrigued. But when he reached the crime scene, he found that the dead man looked nothing like him whatever. And even though the victim was carrying a number of articles about Elvis Cole, there was no resemblance and no reason to think the victim had actually been Elvis' long-lost parent.

But if you wanted to find your father, you'd keep hoping, just as Elvis did. With Detective Diaz' help, and the reluctant assistance of her partner, Detective Pardy, Elvis digs further into the dead man's past, discovering the name he was using, plus still another alias. Meanwhile the victim's partner begins to hunt down Cole, thinking he was the one who killed him in the first place.

A sub-plot brings us to a female detective in the Juvenile Section of the Hollywood Station, named Carol Starkey. A former bomb squad member, now shoved away from the action after being partly blown up, Carol is in love with Elvis – especially since he seems to be estranged from his wife, Lucy. But she can't quite sum up the courage to tell him about her feelings. At least not yet.

The deeper Elvis gets into the past of his mysterious, dead John Doe, the more he gets involved with criminal scum and blackmail – although the victim himself hired prostitutes and call girls, he never had sex with them. The John Doe just paid for each one to pray with him and for him. Cole doesn't know why. The man who, according to Detective Diaz, claimed he was Cole's father evidently had something in his past or present he didn't want to acknowledge – something he was still holding onto, and something that must have been horrible in the extreme.

We're treated to the frantic, psychotic thinking of the victim's partner as he gets closer and closer to Elvis Cole, and near the end of the story, their paths actually meet. What happens then – plus the usual newshound's inclusion of how, where, when and why – is something you'll have to read for yourself to discover.

Robert Crais is an expert when it comes to suspense. Pitting a psychotic killer against an unsuspecting detective when only lucky breaks keep Cole from being murdered along with everybody else is at the core of this riveting tale. Every time the killer misses his intended target one more time you breath a sigh of relief. And the ending is as powerful as the opening chapter. Los Angeles, like every city,
has its share of criminals. And not all of them live within the city limits.

Alan Paul Curtis

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