The Forgotten Man - Elvis Cole & Joe Pike Novel | Crime Thriller Book | Perfect for Mystery Lovers & Beach Reading

Crais is great, and his fans cherish any glimpse we can get into his past, and after having shown us the early life of Joe Pike it's about time he did a similar workup of Elvis' life. I guess it's plausible that somewhere in Florida an elderly private detective is pondering the many times he was hired to bring back the boy Elvis Cole after the boy ran away so many times looking for his dad, the human cannonball.It's possible, but not plausible. Crais does his best to make it seem believable, but it's not.I thought that it would turn out that little Elvis heard his mother wrong and that his real dad was not a "human cannonball" but a "human cannibal." That would have made sense considering where the novel winds up.Elsewhere in the plot Carol Starkey just pines and pines for Elvis as though she were about to burst into "My Man." I remember admiring the way Crais sketched her character in "Demolition Angel," and now I find myself tsk-tsking the way he has turned her into a junior version of the Glenn Close character in "Fatal Attraction," with nothing better to do than to park outside Elvis' house hoping for a glimpse of him. No, no, that's not the Carol you made us love before.Department of Loose Ends: Is it me or at the very beginning of the book, the main villain guy gets panicky and gets a shovel and starts digging up a batch of skulls that have been long buried. What ever happened to those bones? Whose were they, was this ever established?Oh well, this is still a great read and a powerful examination into the way the past has its grip firmly on our souls. As another great US novelist once wrote, "The past isn't dead--it's not even past."Postscript 2009,Here I thought I had missed an Elvis book so I went and ordered this one from Amazon. I read about forty or fifty pages, all excited, and then I got up to the part where Elvis is a child running away from home in search of the man who his mother used to taunt him about--and then, like a lightning strike, I realized I had read the book before. Even if it was the best Elvis book of all, and let's face it, it ain't, the "Human Cannonball" material is a misfire of colossal proportions. My friends and I all agree, yes, when Crais decided to explore Joe Pike's past in an earlier novel, it was rich, meaty and enthralling, but when the Human Cannonball storyline emerges, we all marked it as the moment when Crais jumped the shark.And yes, Carol Sharkey is the very definition of shark jumping, it's even in her name.However, I love the books he's written since The Forgotten Man, so maybe this was just a horrid wrong turn and he's got back on the highway now.It's still a good book, just badly conceived.It's not a one star book, but a disappointment only when considering how good Crais normally is.