SUSPECT by Robert Crais






SUSPECT May Be the Best Book That Crais Has Written

 Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons in 2013

Robert Crais is best known for his long-running Elvis Cole series, but he has consistently produced high-quality "stand-alone" novels as well (however, I just learned that the characters from this book will be part of the next Elvis Cole book). Suspect continues that tradition in a big way.

Scott James is a fairly young member of LAPD who is on the mend from a frightful shooting that resulted in injuries so severe that he was offered a chance to retire. While his physical injuries are real, they are not as profound as his psychological trauma. He was an up-and-coming officer, now he second guesses himself and, more importantly, cannot shake the feeling that he failed his partner who was killed in the incident. He is working the case on his own even as he trains to be a K-9 officer while he is recovering.

Robert Crais
Maggie is a retired German Shepherd who was trained to be a Marine and find Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). She was shot by a sniper while she was protecting her handler. Maggie is lost without her handler - he was her world. They formed a "pack" with just two members and she literally would die for him. But, when the sniper attacked she did not protect her "pack" well enough and her handler died.

Somehow, Maggie ended up in the LAPD K-9 training unit and she and Scott James get paired together - two gun-shy deeply injured souls who begin to open up their damaged little worlds to each other...

Crais' grasp of dog psychology makes this book work. You know how the book will end as soon as these two match up (Of course these two team up and work to redeem themselves to get the bad guys) but it is still a great story - the telling of the story is just as important as how it ends and Crais does a masterful job..

I rate this novel an enthusiastic 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: SUSPECT by Robert Crais.

Reviewed on September 1, 2013.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts over the last 30 days

STAR TREK PICARD: NO MAN'S LAND: AN ORIGINAL AUDIO DRAMA (audiobook) by Kirsten Beyer and Mike Johnson

Image
Published by Simon and Schuster Audio Originals in 2022. Performed by a full cast, including Jeri Ryan and Michelle Hurd. Duration: 1 hour, 39 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Set immediately after the Star Trek streaming show Picard: Season One , the audiobook  No Man's Land is an adventure featuring the characters Seven of Nine and Raffi.  With the collapse of the Romulan Empire comes the rise of local Romulan warlords who are trying to assert their control over the Romulan territory and, just as important, lay claim to the Romulan brand.  A Romulan who has taken the title Emperor is conquering/leveling various planets in an attempt to establish himself as the successor to the Romulan Empire. It looks he is heading towards a planet that is secretly holding a massive collection of written materials, museum pieces, and other cultural relics of the collapsed Romulan Empire.  There is a mad scramble to remove the relics, led by an ancient, kindly professor of unknown or...
Read more

SOLDIER BOY by Michael Shaara

Image
  Published in 1982 by Pocket Books (a Timescape book) Back in the 1980's Simon and Schuster had a division called Pocket Books that specialized in paperback books. Pocket Books had an even smaller division called Timescape . Timescape published sci-fi books, including some of the earliest of the Star Trek novels so they were quite a successful line. Soldier Boy is part of that Timescape line. Michael Shaara (1928-1988) Michael Shaara won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels . Shaara had knocked out a few novels before then, but none were about the Civil War. Instead, a great deal of his writing was sci-fi. He started out selling stories to magazines in 1951. This book is a collection of 14 of those short stories. If you read this book, I recommend reading the Author's Afterword first. He wrote commentary on every story and I used those notes as an introduction to each one.  Like all short story collections, they vary in qu...
Read more

The Secret Scroll by Ronald Cutler

Image
Not good, not bad Published in 2008 by Beaufort Books. Some have reviewed The Secret Scroll very harshly. I am unwilling to do this, despite my opinion that this is not really a good book. I give it 3 Stars. As I told someone else, it is neither drek nor a Pulitzer Prize winner. It's kinda like watching an episode of Matlock - it beats watching nothing but it sure isn't To Kill A Mockingbird , despite being set in the south and having courtroom drama. Positives: -The plot moves along at a quick pace. -Lots of action. -The bad guys are truly bad. -a love story. -I was interested in seeing where Cutler was going with his depictions of Jesus and Paul. -The short (2-5 pages) chapter style makes it an easy book to put down and pick up again. Negatives: -It is set around a scroll that is discovered by an American archaeologist that is supposedly written by Jesus of Nazareth. Cutler makes the text of such a scroll accessible to readers who are unfamiliar with ancie...
Read more

GANGSTERS vs. NAZIS: HOW JEWISH MOBSTERS BATTLED NAZIS in WARTIME AMERICA (audiobook) by Michael Benson

Image
  Highly Recommended Published in 2022 by Tantor Audio. Read by Gabriel Vaughan. Duration: 8 hours, 53 minutes. Unabridged. Flag of the German American Bund In the United States in the 1930's there was a small, loud, enthusiastic, and growing group of Americans that were great fans of Hitler and the Nazi party. They were largely ethnic Germans and formed organizations that sported Nazi symbols and mimicked the big rallies that Hitler had in Germany. They also mimicked the overt antisemitic speech exhibited by the Nazis. The most successful of these was the German American Bund (German American Federation). There were a lot of small groups but there were two larger organizations with a different take than the Bund. The Silver Legion of America  (Silver Shirts) had a spiritualist take on hate. Father Coughlin  was a literal Catholic priest who brought a "Catholic" view on antisemitic hate and anti-interventionism from Detroit. He had a massive radio audience that was ...
Read more

FINDING JESUS: FAITH. FACT. FORGERY: SIX HOLY OBJECTS that TELL the REMARKABLE STORY of the GOSPELS by David Gibson and Michael McKinley

Image
Published in 2015 by MacMillan Audio. Read by Peter Larkin. Duration: 7 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. Finding Jesus is not a deep book theologically, but it does take a balanced look at 6 things that are associated with Jesus and a few related topics and is respectful of the faithful while doing its exploration. If you are expecting a book that is out to burst religious bubbles, this is not your book. The topics are: 1) John the Baptist. Who was he? Is he in the historical record? Are the relics of John the Baptist in scattered across Europe actually him? The James Ossuary. 2) James, the brother of Jesus. Who was he? Was he Jesus' half brother through Mary or a step-brother from a previous marriage of Joseph? Is the James Ossuary (a casket to hold bones) that was discovered a few years ago real? 3) Mary Magdalene. Who was she? Was she a disciple or simply a follower of Jesus? Why is she not mentioned after the four gospels? Was she the wife of Jesus? Was she really a re...
Read more

THE EYES of the DRAGON by Stephen King

Image
Originally published in 1984. Published by Penguin Audio in 2010. Read by Bronson Pinchot. Duration: 10 hours, 18 minutes. Unabridged The ancient kingdom of Delain is ruled by a good king, but not a great king. He is a widower with two sons and an ancient, yet seemingly ageless, magician adviser named Flagg. His oldest son is Peter - a son who shows all of the signs that he will be a great and good king in the future. His youngest son is Thomas, a young man who is a lot like his father. Thomas is very jealous of the well-deserved attention lavished upon Peter and often turns to his only friend - Flagg. Flagg is very powerful, long-lived and an omnipresent dark force in the royal palace. In reality, he is more than a mere magician, he is a malignant force that seeks to create chaos and disorder above all else. Flagg is a frequent character in Stephen King books, most notably in The Stand and The Dark Tower series. This book is his second appearance in King's work. Flagg poiso...
Read more

THE GOLEM'S VOICE (graphic novel) by David G. Klein

Image
  Published in 2015 by Now What Media, LLC Synopsis: Set in Czechoslovakia during World War II, The Golem's Voice  is the story of a young Jewish mom and her two sons trying to escape relocation by the Nazis. This was in the time when the Nazis were still telling Jews that they were relocating them to alternate settlements rather than just taking them to work and death camps. As they are being loaded onto trains, the mom gets a bad feeling and tells her boys (Yoakim and Yakov) to just run. She does not join them because they are much faster than her and she just wants them to escape and live. Her boys run under the trains and, at first, things look good. But, soon enough, Nazi soldiers are in full pursuit and Yoakim is shot providing cover for his little brother. Yakov continues to run to the only place the knows - the Jewish ghetto neighborhood that he just came from. He hears a voice in his head calling him to the home of a long-dead rabbi named Yudah Loew . Legend has it th...
Read more

THE DIRECTOR SHOULD'VE SHOT YOU: MEMOIRS of the FILM TRADE (audiobook) by Alan Dean Foster

Image
Published in 2024 by Tantor Media. Read by Stephen R. Thorne. Duration: 7 hours, 1 minute. Unabridged. Alan Dean Foster is a prolific sci-fi author. He has written over 50 sc-fi novels, but he is probably most famous for his numerous novelizations of sci-fi movies and TV shows, such as the original Star Wars movie (ghost written for George Lucas), Alien , Star Trek: The Animated Series , Krull , and The Last Starfighter . The Director Should've Shot You is the story of Foster's experiences as the man who Hollywood turns to to write novelizations of sci-fi movies. He talks about how that system (usually) works, the odd experiences, his interactions with directors, producers, and faceless stuidio executives, and his various thoughts of the strengths and weaknesses of the various projects.  My experiences with Foster as a young reader start with his two Star Wars books that he wrote when George Lucas  and his team were finishing the original movie. As I noted, he ghost wrote th...
Read more

BRIONNE (audiobook) by Louis L'Amour

Image
Originally published in 1968. Audiobook published in 2016 by Random House Audio. Read by Erik Singer. Duration: 4 hours, 3 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis Major James Brionne is a Virginian and a confidante of President Ulysses S. Grant. He helped pacify the region immediately after the war, including hanging a criminal named Allard. The rest of the Allard family gang, bushwackers from the brutal Missouri theater of the Civil War, comes to Virginia to kill Brionne. They don't find Brionne, but they do find his wife and son at Brionne's plantation house. She takes out one of the Allard gang and then kills herself rather than be brutalized by them. The Allard gang never finds Brionne's son, who had hidden himself in a little cave nearby. Brionne decides he needs a massive change of scenery. He takes his son out West on a train, to a region he had explored as part of a military mission years earlier. He wants to find a place to start over with his son - Utah. But, Briolle gets t...
Read more

Black Like Me (audiobook) by John Howard Griffin

Image
Extraordinarily Powerful As An Audiobook Experience Published in December 2011 by AudioGO Read by Ray Childs Duration: approximately 7 hours. Unabridged. In 1959, John Howard Griffin (1920-1980), an author and journalist decided to go check out the serious rumblings of the Civil Rights movement for himself. Griffin was white and he decided to medically darken his skin (and smooth out the rough spots with dye and shave his head) and go as a black man. His plan was to see if things truly were different on the other side of the color line. Black Like Me is a novelization of his experiences (meaning things were edited and re-arranged to make the story work better) and it starts with him pitching his idea to a publisher and his family. Once he gets funding and permission from his family (after a lot of serious talk about how dangerous this could be) Griffin heads off to New Orleans for his medical treatments. He picks New Orleans because of its more liberal racial attitudes, figuri...
Read more