Taken

December 19, 2011
At the start of bestseller Crais’s satisfying 15th Elvis Cole novel (after 2011’s The Sentry), Jack Berman, a USC dropout, and his girlfriend, Krista Morales, a star student at Loyola Marymount, get caught in a battle between human traffickers and “bajadores”—predators who prey on other criminals—while visiting the site of an old desert plane crash near Rancho Mirage, Calif. Krista’s mother, who’s seen a flattering magazine story about Cole, hires Cole to find her daughter, who she suspects is pretending to be kidnapped as part of a scheme Jack cooked up to extort money so they can get married. While the tension level isn’t up to Crais’s usual standard, Cole and sidekicks Joe Pike and Jon Stone all get a chance to shine as Cole plays a dangerous game that makes him a prisoner of the deadly bajadore known as the Syrian. Told from multiple points of view, this installment would make a fine action-packed film with three strong male leads. Author tour. Agent: Aaron Priest, Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency.

February 1, 2012
A kidnapping drops Elvis Cole and Joe Pike into the maelstrom of human smugglers. After L.A. college senior Krista Morales finds out the secret her boyfriend, USC dropout Jack Berman, has been hiding, she brings him out to the desert to reveal her own secret: the place where her mother Nita, who runs a highly successful business, was once brought into the country as an illegal alien. Unfortunately, the coyotes are still plying their customary trade at the very same spot, and Krista and Jack get swept up in a passing caravan. Convinced there's something strange about a ransom demand of a measly $500 delivered over the phone by her daughter in a heavy Mexican accent, Nita calls in Elvis Cole, the World's Greatest Detective. Working as usual with laconic Joe Pike, Cole soon ties the human-trafficking ring to the Double Dragon Korean gang and Syrian mastermind Ghazi al-Diri. But his attempt to infiltrate the ring as an unscrupulous capitalist who needs cheap labor backfires when he's recognized and seized himself. Now Pike must enlist his mercenary buddy Jon Stone to help rescue Krista, Jack, Cole and maybe even the two dozen illegals with whom they're being held in an undisclosed location. For some reason, the normally reliable Crais (The Sentry, 2011, etc.) doesn't trust his story, loaded with the promise of vigilante heroics and nonstop violence, to deliver the goods. So he jazzes it by pulverizing it into sections that leap back and forth in time and among different points of view (e.g., "ELVIS COLE: four days before he is taken"). The result is to loosen the logical links that connect one set piece to another and recast the whole story as if it were a string of trailers for a dozen hellacious summer movies.

COPYRIGHT(2012) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 1, 2012
Since Crais turned over top billing to Joe Pike, longtime second banana in the Elvis Cole series, his books have jumped a few notches on most best-seller lists. This time the pairPI Cole and freelance mercenary Pikeshare the limelight, though in the course of the action, they're rarely seen together. That's because, a few chapters into the tale, Cole becomes a hostage, and Pike, a hard man but a loyal friend, is pulling out all stops to rescue him. It starts with a simple missing-person case. Krista Morales and her boyfriend have disappeared, inadvertently captured by bajadores, bandits who capture and then sell illegals as they cross the border from Mexico. Cole quickly figures out what happened and almost as quickly finds himself in the hands of the bad guys. With two stars, Crais needs a new supporting actor, and he finds a doozy in Jon Stone, a mercenary with less regard for conventional ethics than even his pal, Pike. We know Pike and Stone won't be denied in their quest to find Cole, but even so, Crais works considerable tension from the hostage situation. The series is at its best when Cole and Pike have more opportunity to interact, but with three characters fighting for screen time, we can't expect everything in one book. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: If the formula of more Joe Pike equals more sales holds true, Crais' latest may not do quite as well as his previous Pike novels, but this one has enough of everythingtension, banter, and head-bangingto keep fans happy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)