The Forgotten Man: An Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Novel

I said in my review of The Last Detective that with his last three books, Robert Crais had become an author worth reading. Nothing in this book changes my mind in that regard. Elvis Cole is back again and is confronted with the murder of a man who claimed to be his father. This is a subject that has haunted Cole since he was a child, however as he investigates the death of the man, he starts to unravel a story that is very dark and very dangerous. Carol Starky from Demolition Angel and The Last Detective returns and I would say is destined to keep returning in future novels, which is something to look forward to. Hard to tell you too much about the plot without giving it away, but suffice it to say that Crais is an author that I look forward to reading.

Elvis Cole dwells in the past in this, Robert Crais' 10th novel featuring the "world's greatest detective". And while Crais' readers love the wise-cracking detective, many of us read the series as much for Joe Pike, his scary, warrior-like back up system. Tough turn, then, that Pike is merely an afterthought in this book.Taking up much of the slack is Carol Starkey, the alcoholic, former bomb-squad detective who starred in Crais' "Demolition Angel" and met up with Elvis in "The Last Detective". Carol's having strong romantic feelings for Elvis, but he's not ready for a new love yet, still licking his wounds from the breakup with former paramour Lucy and her son Ben, who appear briefly.The story allows the reader to break into the murky past of Elvis, when a man is shot, who has been looking for his son. As a child, Elvis was on an endless quest to discover the identity of his father; his mother suffered from an emotional disorder and his grandparents could hardly restrain his need to wander, to try to find himself. He's had a rough childhood, and the possibility that the dead man is his father draws him out of a depression and into the mainstream of the police investigation. During the track of the novel, a character named Frederick, a paranoid schizophrenic, lurks in the background, convinced that Cole was responsible for the death of his friend Payne.As his search for the truth about the dead man evolves, Cole starts to shed light on a cold case, rediscovering his power to energetically pursue answers as he buries himself in his work. A little oblivious to Starkey's feelings, Cole is nevertheless drawn to her by mutual need on the case, and by the recognition that she's another tortured soul. Elvis may be the wittiest of today's detectives in this genre, but Crais proves here that he's not just witty, lucky and likeable, he's also the product of his past.Although "The Forgotten Man" is not nearly the book "The Last Detective" was, Crais continues to disarm his readers and keeps the series alive.There's some complexity here, and some surprises at the end, and Crais fans will be begging for more Elvis Cole when the story concludes. For my money, any real 5 star Elvis Cole story will also bring more action and reaction with the inclusion of the volatile Joe Pike in the story.Recommended for fans who like their thrillers in series, but read the earlier books first.

Crais is great, and his fans cherish any glimpse we can get into his past, and after having shown us the early life of Joe Pike it's about time he did a similar workup of Elvis' life. I guess it's plausible that somewhere in Florida an elderly private detective is pondering the many times he was hired to bring back the boy Elvis Cole after the boy ran away so many times looking for his dad, the human cannonball.It's possible, but not plausible. Crais does his best to make it seem believable, but it's not.I thought that it would turn out that little Elvis heard his mother wrong and that his real dad was not a "human cannonball" but a "human cannibal." That would have made sense considering where the novel winds up.Elsewhere in the plot Carol Starkey just pines and pines for Elvis as though she were about to burst into "My Man." I remember admiring the way Crais sketched her character in "Demolition Angel," and now I find myself tsk-tsking the way he has turned her into a junior version of the Glenn Close character in "Fatal Attraction," with nothing better to do than to park outside Elvis' house hoping for a glimpse of him. No, no, that's not the Carol you made us love before.Department of Loose Ends: Is it me or at the very beginning of the book, the main villain guy gets panicky and gets a shovel and starts digging up a batch of skulls that have been long buried. What ever happened to those bones? Whose were they, was this ever established?Oh well, this is still a great read and a powerful examination into the way the past has its grip firmly on our souls. As another great US novelist once wrote, "The past isn't dead--it's not even past."Postscript 2009,Here I thought I had missed an Elvis book so I went and ordered this one from Amazon. I read about forty or fifty pages, all excited, and then I got up to the part where Elvis is a child running away from home in search of the man who his mother used to taunt him about--and then, like a lightning strike, I realized I had read the book before. Even if it was the best Elvis book of all, and let's face it, it ain't, the "Human Cannonball" material is a misfire of colossal proportions. My friends and I all agree, yes, when Crais decided to explore Joe Pike's past in an earlier novel, it was rich, meaty and enthralling, but when the Human Cannonball storyline emerges, we all marked it as the moment when Crais jumped the shark.And yes, Carol Sharkey is the very definition of shark jumping, it's even in her name.However, I love the books he's written since The Forgotten Man, so maybe this was just a horrid wrong turn and he's got back on the highway now.It's still a good book, just badly conceived.It's not a one star book, but a disappointment only when considering how good Crais normally is.

But not this time. I read Crais when he first published The Monkey's Raincoat and have been a fan of the series. However, with this outing I think Crais uses broad character brushstrokes and largely relies on his plot and there are plot gaps with this book's nemesis.This is a morose Cole given to mooning over his love and wearing his heart on his sleeve. Nothing in here helps us understand this any better. A big problem is in seeing in Cole what inspires Joe Pike's loyalty...it's not in this one. Sure, those who have read the series can backload that relationship but careful writers find ways of connecting this with the reader. The Starkey stuff is so broad it is almost farcical. I hate to say this but Crais is reminding me of Robert Parker with this book and relying solely on a fan base without having to do any real writing. Parker's last severl books are strictly formula and the relationships simply props for the plot. Those who haven't fallen into that trap who come to mind are George Pelacanos who shifts his characters all around and finds interesting new ones and Lawrence Block who keeps inventing new ways of making Matt Scudder fresh and his relationships believable. Another author who maintains his pace is Gary Disher with his Hal Chalmers series.

I've been reading Robert Crais since 1992, and I'm still like a little kid whenever a new "Elvis Cole/Joe Pike" novel comes out. After waiting for two long years, I tried to make THE FORGOTTEN MAN last, but ended up reading it in one day. The newest novel continues a few months where THE LAST DETECTIVE left off. Elvis Cole has recovered from the wound in his hand, Lucy Chenier and her son, Ben, are now living permanently in Louisiana, the publicity has finally died down from the rescue of Ben from the kidnappers by Cole and Pike, and the World's Greatest Detective is now at a lost on what to do with his life now that Lucy and Ben are gone. When the telephone rings at 3:58 in the morning and a voice tells Cole that a man has been killed who, in his last few breaths, claimed to be the Detective's long, lost father, a new adventure begins that will lead our hero on a journey of deep introspection and eventually to personal tragedy. Along the way, the reader will learn of Cole's search for his father as a thirteen-year-old boy and what led him to become a detective many years later, why his mother would disappear for months at a time, leaving him with his grandparents. The reader will also jump up and down at the return of Carol Starkey (DEMOLITION ANGEL & THE LAST DETECTIVE), who now has a crush of the World's Greatest Detective, but is afraid to let him know. With the help of his close friends, Elvis Cole will track down the killer of the man who claimed to be his father, but at a cost that is devastating, leaving the reader numb and shocked, which is exactly how the author planned it. THE FORGOTTEN MAN is Robert Crais at his best, delivering a story that is both compelling and fun to read. It's been a tremendous pleasure to watch Mr. Crais grow as a writer over the last decade, as well as to see the characters of Elvis Cole and Joe Pike evolve. This is definitely one of the best series on the market today, and I highly recommend it any reader who loves suspense and action