The Forgotten Man

Here, again, from as early as chapter four the reader knows the identity of the madman on a killing spree — but there’s more to this detective story that the hunt for killer.

The book opens with an horrific description of husband, wife and son beaten to death with a baseball bat and the discovery of a four-year-old girl, overlooked by the killer, hiding in her bedroom. From there we move on a quarter century or so to a murder in a back alley.

Detective Kelly Diaz of the LAPD discovers the body of an elderly man, covered with self-inflicted tattoos of crosses. Just before he died, he told Diaz he was the famous private investigator Elvis Cole’s father, and to prove it he had a collection of press clippings featuring the main part Cole played in discovering the hiding place and rescuing of a small boy kidnapped for ransom.

Cole, the on-and-off narrator of this story, never knew his father. His eccentric mother disappeared one day, returning home pregnant some time later. When he was a boy she told her son his father was a human cannonball. As often as there was a circus with a human cannonball on the bill, Cole would slip away from home to find his father. Although it seemed unlikely when Detective Diaz called asking him to come to the police station, he hoped against hope that he’d found his father.

Fuelled by the hope of finding his father Cole pursues the case alongside Detective Diaz and her partner Jeff Pardy. Beginning with finding a credit card, they track the dead man’s movements, his stay in a motel, the call girl service he uses, the call girls themselves who he only asks to pray with him for forgiveness.

You’ll find The Forgotten Man an Elvis Cole (yes, this is yet another serial detective) by Robert Crais, at Nigel Khan bookseller, PricePlaza, Ellerslie Plaza, Gulf