The First Rule, Robert Crais, Putnam, $26.95.
Pike said, "Why lamps?"Robert Crais is a very intelligent writer, and one of the ways he demonstrates his intelligence is the way he’s able to intersperse very good standalones (Hostage, The Two Minute Rule) with his successful and enjoyable Elvis Cole series. Another twist he’s added more recently is having some of the "Elvis" series books actually be about Elvis’ enforcer, Joe Pike. The "inner Pike" was beautifully established in what is still my favorite of Crais’ novels—L.A. Requiem—but the subsequent Pike novels, The Watchman and now The First Rule are also excellent, if not up to the celestial standard set by Requiem, which to me is one of the great crime novels of the past couple decades. But it’s been a few years since Requiem, and a guy’s gotta keep writing. And in the case of Robert Crais, thank heavens for that.George smiled softly, and now it was filled with warmth and sadness, and, Pike thought, more than a little loss.
"Oh, Joseph. There is so much darkness in the world. Why not bring light?"
In The First Rule’s horrifying prologue, an entire family is wiped out—Mom, Dad, two children. The only survivor (and she’s hanging by a thread) is the nanny. Unfortunately for whoever killed this family—an apparent part of a recent string of home invasions—the dead man was one of Joe Pike’s "guys". "Frank the Tank", as he was known to Joe and his crew of mercenaries, had left the life to go civilian, but Pike isn’t one to let anything go, and the feelings he has for Frank are the driving force of the narrative. There’s a couple other of Pike’s guys whose feelings for Frank run deep and intense, one of them still in prison, one of them out of prison. Pike begins to use his subterranean connections to get to the bottom of who killed his old friend and his family.
He starts with the nanny, which eventually pushes his investigation in another direction, toward Serbian gangs operating in L.A. The feds are all over the killings and they don’t want Pike stepping on their toes, though they’re not above asking him what he knows. Because one of the lead investigators has her own reasons for finding Frank’s killer (he killed one of her friends, a fellow agent) she’s willing to both cut Pike some slack and to help him out a bit. Robert Crais’ writing and storytelling is an almost perfect blend of narrative and character, with enough grounding in reality to keep the reader more than engaged. The way he’s able to up the emotional involvement—you’ll be angry Frank was killed too—is the master stroke that makes his books so memorable.
One of the things I think he’s the very best in the business at are action sequences. These are difficult to write—read a bad one sometime, and you’ll see what I mean—but Crais’ are almost textbook. He sometimes switches points of view during these sequences, making them even more effective. This may be his background in television writing (he was a writer for L.A. Law, one of my favorite shows of all time) or it may just be a gift. Wherever it comes from, it makes the books even more of a pleasure. It’s almost criminal.
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