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THE FIRST RULE
by Robert Crais
Putnam, January 2010
320 pages
$26.95
ISBN: 0399156135


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Joe Pike is the dark and ruthless partner of Elvis Cole, a private investigator in Los Angeles who is usually the protagonist of Robert Crais's series. But this time, Pike is at the center of the story and Cole only assists and abets him.

Frank Meyer was peacefully spending an evening at home with his wife, two sons, and their nanny when four armed men burst into their house and executed all five of them. At one time in his life Meyer had been a soldier and then a mercenary under the command of Joe Pike. Their code was that they protected each other's backs at all times and Pike feels an obligation to discover who had murdered his friend and destroy them.

Enlisting the aid of several others from that mercenary corps and later his partner Elvis Cole, Pike plunges into the unsavory world of Serbian gangsters where the first rule is to destroy their families so that they can be unfettered by any "hostages to fortune" or threatened with harm to loved ones. Pike discovers that there had been a baby in the care of the nanny and that clue led him to the actual murderers and the man behind the murders as well. It is complicated, dangerous and vicious, but Pike is equal to the task.

The theme of this book is that the end justifies the means, that it is all right to murder and mutilate bad men in pursuit of a evil-doer. Pike is amoral in the sense that he will do whatever he must to achieve his goal. He has always been the enforcer when Elvis Cole was pursuing criminals and murderers, which allowed Cole to keep his hands clean while still getting the job done. Pike is not alone in the pages of crime fiction. One only has to think of Robert Parker's Spenser and Hawk to understand how useful this device is.

In this book we see some of Pike's back story and learn how he became the enforcer. He is superhuman, able to take out three or four men with his bare hands, run faster, hit harder, jump higher than anyone else. Obviously he is not a believable character. He is what all of us perhaps would like to be. He is the dream of every armchair investigator. When we enter his world, we suspend all disbelief and let ourselves enjoy that ride.

The book is set in Los Angeles and the city is portrayed very skilfully. The reader sees the crowded freeways, the rows of tiny cottages in the poorer parts of town, the apartment buildings lining the streets, the warehouses, the marina, and the hills and woods that are also part of the city. Los Angeles is not a glamorous or romantic place in this book.

The story is exciting and professionally written. It is easy to read and allows the reader to lose herself for a time in an exciting world, not a world we really want to live in, but one that is amusing to imagine and safe to enter. I fear that in the real world the bad guys win too often, but in this wonderful make-believe world the good guys always win and they are always right.

Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, December 2009

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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