The Forgotten Man Robert Crais Orion £12.99 hbk Mar 2005 Ayo Onatade

The last outing we had featuring the inscrutable Elvis Cole was back in 2003 in The Last Detective. Crais has now brought him back in this latest novel The Forgotten Man. Cole has been rather distracted since we last saw him, but he is slowly getting his life back together again after the upsetting issues that he had to deal with. However, he is given a rather rude awakening when he receives a worrying telephone call from the LAPD in the early hours of the morning. It takes him back to childhood memories he had tucked away for so long.

An apparently homeless man is found shot in an alley and the first officer who arrived on the scene informs Cole that before he died the man claimed to be Cole’s father. Cole of course never knew who his father was as his mother who was mentally unstable had the habit of disappearing for long periods. Cole was conceived during one of these periods and the only clue he has ever had about his father was that he was a “human cannonball” in a circus. Cole has always wanted to track down his father at one stage it got to the point of an obsession. As Cole looks into the dead man’s past, he is unaware that his has made himself the target of an accomplice of the deceased man.

This is a much more of an emotional and personal novel than one would normally expect. Cole struggles fiercely to ascertain whether the dead man’s last words are in fact true only to find himself with his longtime partner Joe Pike watching his back as he is caught up in an extremely dangerous game where he is the bait. This does not however stop him from using people and in this case, it is the besotted Carol Starkey first seen in Demolition Angel. Despite the snappy dialogue and the bursts of violence, that takes place the best thing about this series as a whole is the intensity and the character driven studies of people that surface in Crais’s writing. In this case, we see that the reason Cole became a detective stems from his incessant need to track down his father.

It is not often that one comes across a book that leaves the reader with a lump in their throat, but in this case, The Forgotten Man does it quite easily. It goes without saying that Crais’s Elvis Cole books are much more heartfelt than his standalones and The Forgotten Man is no exception. Once again, Robert Crais has provided his legion of fans with an outstanding novel that elucidates more than a few of Cole’s insecurities.