Where do I start? I want to like Robert Crais. I don’t think he writes badly. I don’t think he plots badly. I don’t think his characters are bad. But none of them are good enough and every aspect of his work seems endemically infected with stereotypes.

I picked up the Elvis Cole series on the eighth book and I thought the ending was lousy but I reckoned that it wasn’t written for me. It was the kind of ending a long time series reader could live with. After eight books you can forgive your heros for acting heroically and in the interests of truth, justive and the American way. This however was a standalone book. Everything known about these characters and all the justification for the twists in the plotline has to be between these covers.

Our heroine was once dead. For a couple of minutes after a bomb exploded her heart stopped and she was saved by paramedics. She was a bomb technician seeking to defuse that bomb. So was her lover. He died and the same time she did but he didn’t get resucitated. I think it’s fair enough to find our heroine, several years later, still a bit freaked out by this and with some alcoholic leanings. She’s now a detective with the LAPD and her current case involves finding the person who planted another bomb that has killed another bomb technician. So far we have an interesting story and it could have easily been a good one. There were numerous elements to the story that were interesting and orginal but I don’t remember those.

What i do remember, though I’ve forgotten some of them, is how many cliched elements there were to this story. There was a federal agent who wasn’t really a federal agent. There was the rural cop who overlooked something obvious to the city cop. There was the perpetrator killing off the informant. There was the… oh, I’d be here hours if I went through them. None of them were major problems on their own, but strung together I felt like I was being subjected to the results of the ‘How to Write a Thriller 101’ course. When our heroine has her police shield removed from her three chapters from the end I shut the book in disgust.

There are books I like in spite of their faults. This isn’t one of them.