Crais is a whip-smart writer. Cole and Pike are carefully drawn, multilayered characters who’ve grown more complex through the years. This is one of the very best entries in a long-running and still first-rate series.
Mr. Crais unspools this tense and involving saga—which races all over the Los Angeles area, from the fading allure of the 'Miracle Mile' to the sun-blasted San Fernando Valley to the shores of Malibu—with dashes of wit, lots of local color, many bursts of sudden action and some 300 pages of relentless suspense.
If you’ve always wished Lee Child’s Jack Reacher had a little more balance in his life—but the same formidable talents—you'll love Joe Pike and the latest book in this long, superb series ... Told from the alternating perspectives of Joe, Elvis, and various criminals, the story becomes multilayered while the tension builds. Crais never loses control of his clean, clear prose or his ability to sketch fully fleshed characters in a few scenes, with Joe providing the action and Elvis providing the insight ... A taut, exceptional thriller.
... outstanding ... Crais begins the story with deceptive simplicity but slowly ratchets up both the tension and the action with surgical precision. The scenes in which Joe saves Isabel from her captors and the final shoot-out among a colorful array of hit men, police, and U.S. Marshals stand as high-water marks among Crais’s illustrious crime oeuvre ... This one’s sure to hit the bestseller charts.
