L.A. REQUIEM
By Robert Crais
Doubleday, June 1999
366 pages $23.95
ISBN 0-385-49583-8

   If you don't buy and read this book, you ought to be shot. All right, maybe that's pushing it a little, but if you want to keep your membership card in the human race, you need to read L.A. REQUIEM by Robert Crais. The suspense will have you turning pages so fast, you'll forget to breathe!This is a tour de force by a true modern master. Yes, this is the eighth book about Elvis Cole. If you're already a fan, that's enough to send you to the bookstore. You'll snap this one up and cruise through it in one sitting because this one finally delivers the goods on Elvis Cole's partner, Joe Pike. The truth about how Pike grew up, about why the LAPD hates him, about the women in Pike's life. Where did his pain come from? Just who is the enigmatic Joe Pike?

   I envy the readers who discover Crais with this book. They will be catching the wave as Crais is hitting peak performance.Intricate plot combined with relentless pacing and powerful emotions--what more can you ask for from a novel? This is a book about the different kinds of love. The love of parents and children. The love of man and woman and the ultimate sacrifices we will make for each other. The love between best friends and how far you'll go to help them.

   Crais has outdone himself. From THE MONKEY'S RAINCOAT through SUNSET EXPRESS, the Elvis Cole novels were told in first person with Elvis Cole as the narrator. With INDIGO SLAM, he added a little twist--a third person prologue to show something Cole would not have seen. With L.A. REQUIEM, he cranks things up further with the bulk of the story unfolding in Cole's wonderful first person viewpoint. But there are flashbacks to Joe Pike's childhood, his time as a marine and as a cop. There are scenes from other viewpoints as well, but I won't give them away.

   This is a well-rounded locomotive of a suspense thriller. It opens in the past with Joe Pike and his partner, Abel Wozniak, moving in to arrest a pedophile. There is tension between the partners that escalates when Wozniac strikes the suspect and is ready to shoot him for his crimes. Pike steps in and the next thing you know, Wozniac is dead and Pike is the most hated man on the force for killing his own partner to protect a child molester.

   Cut to the present.Joe Pike calls Elvis Cole and asks for a favor. In all the years they've been friends, Pike has never asked Cole for anything. When Elvis shows up to meet a Mr. Garcia, he finds that Pike called him in to help find Garcia's missing daughter because the police wouldn't do anything. Why should they? The daughter, Karen, is thirty-two years old and has only been "missing" since the previous morning. Garcia begs Pike to help and we find that Pike had dated the missing woman back when he'd been a policeman. Garcia even thought Pike would be part of the family. This is a shock to Elvis. Joe Pike in love and on the verge of marriage?

   Joe and Elvis poke around and meet a homeless man named Edward Deege who says he saw Pike with Karen the day before.Pike says he hasn't seen her in years. They find Karen's car parked where she would have left it to go for her run, but there is no sign of her. The investigation continues.

   Next thing you know, Karen's body turns up. She's been shot in the head at point blank range.

   Garcia has tons of political pull and he wants Joe and Elvis to assist with the police investigation. Problem:a man named Krantz heads up the investigation and he hates Joe from years before--not just for having killed Wozniak, but for damaging his career during an Internal Affairs interrogation. That scene alone, when it comes, is worth the price of the book.

   Elvis doesn't feel that Krantz is handling the case properly, so he begins to do some digging of his own. What he discovers is that the investigation isn't just for the murder of Karen Garcia, but for four other victims as well. The police have tried and failed to connect the murders, which indicates that they are the work of a serial killer. This leads Krantz to suspect one of the men who found Karen's body.

   Problem. The man who found the body gets murdered. To make matters worse, a woman who witnessed the murderer going into the house picks Joe Pike out of the lineup.

   Elvis must dig through his best friend's past to try to find out what really happened. This creates tension in his relationship with Lucy Chenier who moved from Louisiana to L.A. to try to make their relationship work (they met in the book VOODOO RIVER--another great thing about the series--the characters grow and change from book to book). She doesn't like what she learns about Joe--or about Elvis.

   Is Pike really a murderer? Just how well do we know the people we consider friends and lovers? L.A. REQUIEM explores this in a multi-layered fashion that never takes the easy way out. There are scenes where you want to cheer and scenes where you want to cry. This is a true masterpiece of fiction in general and crime fiction in particular. To date, this is the best book Robert Crais has written. This is a Must-Read for anyone who loves great fiction of any kind. Don't be an idiot. Buy it. Read it. You have been warned.

Highly recommended.