Book Review: The Wanted by Robert Crais

The Wanted

by

Robert Crais

Publisher: Simon & Schuster 
Publication date: 28th December 2017
Series: Elvis Cole & Joe Pike #17 
Genre: Crime / Thriller / Mystery
Pages: 336
RRP: Kindle $9.99AUD  Paperback $32.99 AUD
Format read: eBook
Source: Courtesy of the publisher via Netgalley 

Seventeen-year-old Tyson is a normal teenage boy – he’s socially awkward, obsessed with video games, and always hungry. But his mother is worried that her sweet, nerdy son has started to change… and she’s just found a $40,000 Rolex watch under his bed. Suddenly very frightened that Tyson has gotten involved in something illegal, his mother gets in touch with a private investigator named Elvis Cole and asks him to do some digging.

Cole uncovers a connection between Tyson and eighteen unsolved burglaries in LA’s ritziest neighbourhood. Tyson spooks and runs.

And then people start dying...

 

The Wanted has been on my Netgalley to read list for over two years. I don’t know what it was that caused me to keep putting it off. I had never read Robert Crais before. (Where have I been!!)

The main character, Private Investigator Elvis Cole, is easy to like. He is calm, collected and thoughtful. He is a bit of a ladies man so I am interested to read more backstory. His partner, Joe Pike, is dark sunglasses and taciturn but every now and then a softer side will emerge.

Cole is hired by worried mum Devon Connor to find out how her 17 year old son, Tyson, is acquiring designer clothes and a Rolex watch.

As Cole investigates the ownership of the watch he finds it is stolen property and part of a major police investigation involving a large number of burglaries. Cole seems to be one step ahead of the police in this investigation however, there are two thugs, hired to find some of the stolen goods, that are steps ahead of them both and they are leaving dead bodies in their wake. The baddies were bad but they were also laugh out loud funny which was the perfect contrast to lighten the darkness in this story.

The Wanted is fast paced and gritty. The portrayal of the teens, Tyson and his friends, was real. Their skill with technology but also their naivety was well depicted.

I have now found myself a new series and at book #17 I have plenty to catch up on.

 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 

 My rating  5/5

Robert Crais is the author of the best-selling Elvis Cole novels. A native of Louisiana, he grew up on the banks of the Mississippi River in a blue collar family of oil refinery workers and police officers. He purchased a secondhand paperback of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister when he was fifteen, which inspired his lifelong love of writing, Los Angeles, and the literature of crime fiction. Other literary influences include Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Robert B. Parker, and John Steinbeck.
After years of amateur film-making and writing short fiction, he journeyed to Hollywood in 1976 where he quickly found work writing scripts for such major television series as Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, and Miami Vice, as well as numerous series pilots and Movies-of-the-Week for the major networks. He received an Emmy nomination for his work on Hill Street Blues, but is most proud of his 4-hour NBC miniseries, Cross of Fire, which the New York Times declared: "A searing and powerful documentation of the Ku Klux Klan’s rise to national prominence in the 20s."
In the mid-eighties, feeling constrained by the collaborative working requirements of Hollywood, Crais resigned from a lucrative position as a contract writer and television producer in order to pursue his lifelong dream of becoming a novelist. His first efforts proved unsuccessful, but upon the death of his father in 1985, Crais was inspired to create Elvis Cole, using elements of his own life as the basis of the story. The resulting novel, The Monkey’s Raincoat, won the Anthony and Macavity Awards and was nominated for the Edgar Award.