A Charred Landscape; Review of Robert Crais' New Book

At the start of Robert Crais's 11th Elvis Cole novel, a fire has broken out in the Hollywood Hills and is sweeping through Laurel Canyon. A young cop and an old cop on the scene "could smell the fire -- it was still a mile away, but a sick desert wind carried the promise of Hell." The young cop is awed that Joni Mitchell once lived nearby, but the other one doesn't give a damn. Their job is to go door to door and make sure people evacuate. We see snapshots of the chaos: "They passed a little girl following her mother to an SUV, the girl dragging a cat carrier so heavy she couldn't lift it. Her mother was crying." Finally, at one house, the policemen smell death. Inside, they find the body of a man, an apparent suicide, and nearby a scrapbook with gruesome photographs of seven women who appear to have been murdered.

Crais didn't have to set Laurel Canyon on fire. A deliveryman or the landlord could have found the body. But that raging fire previews what lies ahead: a world of sudden danger and surprises, the fulfillment of that early promise of Hell. Crais's private investigator, Elvis Cole, soon becomes involved in the case of the corpse with the scrapbook. The Los Angeles police insist that the dead man killed all seven of the women, and they thus claim to have exposed a serial killer. Cole, however, suspects that a senior police official is trying to close the cases to protect a prominent politician. At that point, I feared we were entering territory -- high-level corruption in the LAPD -- that we've often seen before, notably in Michael Connelly's novels. But Crais's story keeps veering off in unexpected directions. You won't guess the ending of "Chasing Darkness," but you'll probably be intrigued by it.