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Summary
Summary
A New York Times Bestselling Author -- LAPD cop Scott James is not doing so well. Eight months ago, a shocking nighttime assault killed his partner Stephanie and nearly killed him and left him ready to explode. He's unfit for duty -- until he meets his new partner. A German Shepherd who survived three tours before losing her handler to and IED, Maggie's PTSD is as bad as Scott's. They are each other's last chance, and they set out to find the men who murdered Stephanie.
Author Notes
Robert Crais was born in 1953 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Before becoming a writer, he was a mechanical engineer. In 1976, he began writing scripts for television series including Miami Vice, Cagney and Lacey, and Hill Street Blues. He is the author of the Elvis Cole series and the Joe Pike series. The Monkey's Raincoat won the Anthony and Macavity Awards in 1988. In 2005, his novel Hostage was adapted into a movie starring Bruce Willis. He is the 2006 recipient of the Ross Macdonald Literary Award. In 2017 his title, The First Rule, made the IBook Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Expect the expected in this stand-alone crime thriller from Shamus Award-winner Crais (The Two Minute Rule). Maggie, a weapon-detecting German shepherd who was seriously traumatized in Afghanistan after an IED killed her human partner and she was shot by a sniper, is struggling as a new member of the LAPD K-9 Platoon. LAPD officer Scott James-who was traumatized after unidentified gunmen killed his partner, Stephanie Anders, and seriously wounded him-makes it his mission to get past Maggie's defenses to make her functional again. An attractive female detective assists James after his own return to form enables him to take a more active role in investigating who gunned down Anders. Dog lovers who believe the animals are superior to humans in every way will find this lukewarm tale of redemption inspiring. Fans of Crais's sharp-edged Elvis Cole novels will find less to admire. Author tour. Agent: Aaron Priest, Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency. (Jan. 22) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Veteran thriller-maven Crais (Taken, 2012, etc.) returns with a pleasingly perplexing storyline fresh from the headlines. The heroine of the piece is Maggie, a 3-year-old German shepherd on her second deployment as a patrol and bomb-sniffing dog in Afghanistan. She is fiercely loyal to her handler--so when the inevitable happens, as it does in the evocative, grisly set piece that opens Crais' latest, she's thrown for a loop. Crais has to get a little didactic to provide the basis for innocent civilians: "Dogs suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder shared similar stress reactions with humans, and could sometimes be retrained, but it was slow work that required great patience on the part of the trainer, and enormous trust on the part of the dog." True dat. For her sacrifice, Maggie is not sent to live out her life on the farm, but instead teamed up with trauma-stricken, guilt-ridden LAPD officer Scott James, who, like Maggie, has lost his partner in action. The difference is that Maggie's handlers know who the bad guys were, whereas James has to go Rambo and find out who shot up him and his friend. The answer, revealed after a sequence of carefully plotted, well-described episodes, won't come as a surprise to anyone who's read James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential, though the resolution is more up-to-date. The story takes in vast swaths of Los Angeles in all its multicultural glory, with baddies in the drug and diamond and policing businesses alike. And it's oddly affecting, with Crais ably capturing the bond between humans and canines without veering into sentimentality. A solid, muscular thriller, well-spun.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The most multifaceted and appealing new protagonist in crime fiction this year just may turn out to be a dog and a hard-boiled dog, to boot. Maggie is a German shepherd trying out for the LAPD's K-9 unit, but it looks like she isn't going to make it. A former military dog, Maggie survived three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan but was severely wounded (her handler was killed) and now suffers from the canine version of PTSD. LAPD cop Scott James, shot during an altercation in which his partner was killed, also suffers from PTSD and has been assigned to the K-9 unit, but it doesn't look he's going to make it, either. Scott and Maggie immediately bond, but the hard-nosed sergeant who heads the unit doubts whether either one can measure up. Man and dog think otherwise, however, and as Scott continues off the books to investigate the shooting that cost his partner her life, he finds that Maggie has his back, just as his partner did. Taking a break from his critically acclaimed Elvis Cole and Joe Pike series, Crais launches what looks like a stand-alone, but anyone who reads 20 pages of this gripping and heartrending thriller will devoutly pray that it's the beginning of a new series. As Scott digs deeper into the death of his partner, he stumbles on a massive cover-up. That story is thoroughly involving and skillfully presented, but, frankly, it's hard for the reader to think of anything but Maggie. We become singlemindedly obsessed with the safety of this beautiful, sensitive, and stunningly intelligent animal, much as Maggie lives to protect and please Scott. Crais take us inside Maggie's head and, even more, her remarkably sensitive nose but always in the most believable of terms (this is no talking-dog cozy). A read-in-one-sitting thriller, plot- and character-driven in equal measures. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Crais has hit the New York Times best-seller list eight times, with Taken making it to number one. The track record will jump-start this one, but the book itself will do the rest.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Old homicide cops never die; they just shuffle off to the cold case department. That's where Michael Connelly's maverick, Harry Bosch, found himself after his ill-considered resignation from the Los Angeles Police Department. The same spirit of insubordination periodically lands a career detective like Jussi AdlerOlsen's Carl Morck in some dead-end division like Department Q. And in the honorable tradition of the watch commander known as the Oracle in Joseph Wambaugh's Hollywood Station procedurals, every veteran seems to feel duty-bound to take one last crack at an unsolved murder before he retires. Come to think of it, every active homicide assignment involving a longtime serial killer seems to lead to the cold case files. Ian Rankin covers all these bases in STANDING IN ANOTHER MAN'S GRAVE (Reagan Arthur/ Little, Brown, $25.99). His incorruptible but moody hero, John Rebus, had second thoughts after retiring from the Edinburgh police force and has since made his way back as a civilian employee in the Serious Crime Review Unit. Rebus claims to find satisfaction working these old cases, "each one ready to take him on a trip back through time." But he doesn't come to life until the mother of a teenage girl who vanished on New Year's Eve in 1999 persuades him that her daughter's disappearance set the pattern for more recent missing persons cases, each occurring in the vicinity of the same major highway and all involving young women. Always impressive at handling plot complications, Rankin adds another twist by making Rebus redundant, forcing this ex-cop to take unorthodox action in order to muscle his way into an active investigation. As an outsider, he can ignore protocol and consort with criminals, to the point of activating hostilities between two major underworld figures. But his seditious behavior hardly endears him to the detectives working the current kidnapping, and finally goads an enemy in the complaints department into waging a vendetta to keep him from rejoining the force. ("I know a cop gone bad when I see one.") What's really at issue here isn't Rebus's maverick style but his character. Abrasive, secretive and unable to make nice with his superiors, he's not a team player - never was, never will be. At the same time, he's uncomfortably aware that he's out of step with the new age. As a sad Scottish toast goes: "Here's tae us / Wha's like us? / Gey few - / And they're a' deid." But once in a while some dinosaur like Rebus manages to rise up to show us how to get the job done. Maggie is one gorgeous girl, altogether worthy of playing a leading role in SUSPECT (Putnam, $27.95), Robert Crais's heart-tugging novel about two wounded war veterans who nudge each other back to life after suffering a traumatic loss. Maggie is a 3-year-old German shepherd whose best friend was felled by a land mine in Afghanistan. Scott James, a young officer with the Los Angeles Police Department, went to pieces when he failed to save his partner's life in a street shootout. Scott and Maggie survive their battle wounds, but they're so debilitated by posttraumatic stress that neither is fit for duty - until they partner up in the Metro K-9 Unit. Scott accepts Maggie for all the wrong reasons ("They do what you say, don't talk back, and it's only a dog") because he's desperate to return to the street so he can go after the professional killers who shot his partner. And although Maggie was bred to guard and protect, she has a lot of tough Marine training to unlearn before she can become a nonviolent cop. Although Scott is a good guy who brings high-grade skills to his detective work, it's Maggie who holds us captive, enthralled by Crais's perceptive depiction of her amazing capacities. Maggie may be "only a dog," but she's the leader of her pack. Tim Dorsey's nutty novels about a manic serial killer and his weed-smoking sidekick are fanciful, but they're not nonsensical. Accompanied by his habitually groggy friend Coleman in THE RIPTIDE ULTRA-GLIDE (Morrow, $25.99), Serge A.