A former scriptwriter for such televisions shows as Cagney & Lacey, Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice, Crais has, like Michael Connelly, successfully made Los Angeles his literary stamping ground. Of his thirteen novels to date, ten have featured his private detective Elvis Cole, introduced in 1987 in The Monkey's Raincoat. An investigator in the classic mould, Cole is smart, wisecracking, cool and very tough. Like Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch, he is also a Vietnam veteran, but one who, on the surface, has a sunnier, more easy-going disposition, probably best summed up by the talismanic Pinocchio clock and Jiminy Cricket figurine adorning his office. He has a reasonably successful career as a private eye, in which he is aided by his friend and fellow veteran, the extremely taciturn and even tougher Joe Pike, who adds a whole new stratum of meaning to the expression 'silent partner'. Eyes masked by ubiquitous black shades, Pike is implacable, aloof and absolutely deadly; a sidekick more fascinating than most heroes and a man whom Cole would trust with his life.

In The Monkey's Raincoat, a pleasant woman named Ellen Lang hires Cole to track down her missing husband and young son. What starts out as a fairly simple case swiftly becomes increasingly complex and dangerous and, before long, he and Pike become embroiled in a deadly chase, one that takes them from some of LA's meaner streets to the beautiful boulevards paraded by the upper echelons of Hollywood's elite. Along the way, they uncover a murky melange of sex, drugs and murder, and the case concludes in something approaching a bloodbath, or, as an LAPD detective puts it, ‘like Rambo Goes to Hollywood’. With this atmospheric, entertaining and hugely exciting novel, Crais inaugurated a wonderful series and, in Cole and Pike, he fashioned an inimitable team.

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