Review of CHASING DARKNESS (Brilliance Audio 2008)
By guest blogger Star Lawrence
Author, Robert Crais; read by James Daniels
I am no cop lover. So I am a big fan of private dicks who nip at the heels of the police. If they can do it with funny asides, more the better. You can’t be too funny, actually.
Elvis Cole is one such literary heel-nipper. He, of course, lives in a house perched on an LA canyon wall, has an iconoclastic cat who takes no nip (speaking of nip) and an even more cynical ex-cop friend named Joe Pike.
Some years before, Cole had been hired by a local lawyer to try to get his client off a murder charge—indeed, Cole found a tape of the guy elsewhere during the time of the crime and the accused walked. Now—the guy is found, apparently a victim of suicide, with a book of Polaroids of dying women (blood still spurting) at his feet. The woman Cole proved he did not kill is in the book.
Hey! No fair! Cole insists he was right the first time and sets off to roam the weirdos, aggrieved relatives, offbeat landlords, busybodies and all the usual suspects you’d expect in a wise-ass detective novel to prove the dead guy did not commit at least that one murder.
And who should be acting strangely? The police! (Did you call that one? I did.)
I had a problem with the reader, James Daniels, who has sort of a light voice that to me did not fit Cole, although he has apparently read other Cole and Joe Pike books. I also thought the title was blah—darkness, evil, murder, killer, ripper—pick one from Column A, etc. I could have thought up many better titles.
Despite this, it’s a fun ride—assuming you are not in the Death Album (see? better) and at least this time, I wasn’t. So far, so good.
Star Lawrence is a health writer and author of the blog HEALTH'Sass.
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