Los Angeles, 3:58 a.m.: Elvis Cole receives the phone call he’s been waiting for since childhood. Responding to a gunshot, the LAPD has found an injured man in an alleyway. He has told the officer on the scene that he is looking for his son, Elvis Cole. Minutes later, the man is dead.
Elvis Cole's relationship with attorney Lucy Chenier is strained. When she moved from Louisiana to join Elvis in Los Angeles, she never dreamed that violence would so easily touch her life -- but then the unthinkable happens. While Lucy is away on business and her ten-year-old son, Ben, is staying with Elvis, Ben disappears without a trace. Desperate to believe that the boy has run away, evidence soon mounts to suggest a much darker scenario.
Crais's wise-cracking LA private eye Elvis Cole is one of the most appealing heroes in the genre. In this, his eighth outing, Elvis is torn between loyalty to his best friend and partner, ex-cop Joe Pike, and the need to solve the murder of a young woman, Pike's ex-girlfriend and the daughter of a powerful and rich man. But as the investigation continues the finger of suspicion points more and more at Pike himself.
When a 15-year-old girl shows up to plead with Elvis to find her errant father, his first impulse is to hand the case over to Social Services. But he sees how hard the kid is working to keep her two siblings together and afloat. The father sounds like an angel; the case should be a cinch. But as Elvis investigates, he finds the dad seems to be a mover in the criminal underworld who is on the verge of a grand scheme. Could this be the right guy?
Five minutes after his new client leaves his office, Elvis and his partner, the enigmatic Joe Pike, are hip-deep in a deadly situation as they plummet into a world of South Central gangs, corrupt cops, and conspiracies of silence. And before the case is through, every cop in the LAPD will be gunning for a pair of escaped armed-and-dangerous killers - Elvis Cole and Joe Pike.
