Showing results by author "Robert Crais" in All Categories

When Nita Morales hires Elvis Cole to find her missing daughter, she's sure it's a ruse orchestrated by the girl and her boyfriend. She's wrong. They've been taken by bajadores - border bandits who prey on the innocent by buying, selling, and disposing of victims like commodities. Cole and Joe Pike start an undercover investigation to find the couple, but their plan derails when Cole disappears, leaving Pike to burn through the murderous world of human traffickers to find his friend as well as the missing young people. But he may already be too late...

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple goal: to bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them. The festival was an immediate success and has become the largest and most prestigious book festival in the country, attracting more than 130,000 book lovers each year.

Frank Meyer had got out of 'the life' safely. He had put an end to his mercenary days, turned over a new leaf and settled down with his wife and children. It had been a hard decision but, encouraged by his boss and friend Joe Pike, he had walked away. Ten years later, a group of armed men break into his Los Angeles home and brutally gun down him and his family. It's a vicious, cold and professional job. The crew leave no trace behind except the bodies.

Lawyer David Hamill is ready to start over. Fresh off of a divorce, he plans to recharge in Lake Tahoe on his way to his new job at a prestigious law firm in San Francisco. When David’s new sports car—an indulgence he barely could afford but couldn’t resist—runs dangerously low on gas on his late-night road trip, the sign for the truck route offers hope for a place to fill up. Then his car loses speed and power on the winding isolated highway, leaving David stranded with few options in high desert country.

Six months after nearly losing everything to the men who kidnapped his girlfriend's ten-year-old son, Elvis Cole is slowly coming back to life - when he receives an ominous phone call from the LAPD. An unidentified body has been found in a seedy Los Angeles alley. The only clue the cops have is a packet of newspaper articles about the past exploits of Elvis Cole - and the fact that before the man died, he said he was Elvis' father...Joe Pike is the only person who can help Elvis navigate his past.

On his own turf in L.A., PI Elvis Cole is embroiled in a controversial, high-profile murder case. A wealthy restaurateur is accused of murdering his wife and his hot-shot defence lawyer hires Cole to find proof that the detective on the case, Angela Rossi, fooled around with the evidence. Yet as Elvis investigates Rossi for the defence team, he begins to be more suspicious of the media-loving lawyers than the cops.

Originally published a decade ago and now expanded, this book is a homage to the greatest detective story writer of the 20th century, an Anglo-American who took Los Angeles, his adopted home, off the road maps and into the land of legend. For Raymond Chandler, who died in 1959, his literary descendants will do just about anything, and that includes contributing to an anthology honoring him. Thus, in here we find the likes of Sara Paretsky, Robert Crais, Loren D. Estleman, Jonathan Valin, Robert Campbell, Eric Van Lustbader, Simon Brett, Julie Smith, Jeremiah Healy, Roger L. Simon, James ...

It is fire season and the hills of Los Angeles are burning. As the Police and Fire Departments evacuate the inhabitants, they find something no one expected: the days-old corpse of a middle-aged recluse who apparently committed suicide. Then comes an even more horrible discovery. Clutched in his lap is a photo album containing photographs of seven young women who have been murdered. Each photograph was taken only moments after the women were killed and could only have been taken by the killer.

LAPD cop Scott James is not doing so well, not since a shocking nighttime assault by unidentified men killed his partner Stephanie, nearly killed him, and left him enraged, ashamed, and ready to explode. He is unfit for duty - until he meets his new partner. Maggie is not doing so well, either. The German shepherd survived three tours in Iraq and Afghanistan sniffing explosives before she lost her handler to an IED and sniper attack, and her PTSD is as bad as Scott’s.

Elvis Cole is just a detective who can't say no, especially to a girl in a terrible fix. And Jennifer Sheridan qualifies. Her fiance, Mark Thurman, is a decorated LA cop with an elite plainclothes unit, but Jennifer is sure he's in trouble - the kind of serious trouble that only Cole can get him out of.

Peter Alan Nelsen is a super-successful movie director who is used to getting what he wants. And what he wants now is to find the wife and infant child he dumped on the road to fame. It's the kind of case that Cole could handle in his sleep, except that when Cole actually finds Nelsen's ex-wife, everything takes on nightmarish proportions - a nightmare which involves Cole with a nasty New York mob family and a psycho killer who is the son of the godfather.

Bradley Warren had lost something very valuable, something that belonged to someone else: a rare 13th-century Japanese manuscript called the Hagakure. Everything PI Elvis Cole knew about Japanese culture he'd learned from reading Shogun, but he knew a lot of crooks - and what he didn't know, his sidekick Joe Pike did.

Together, Cole and Pike begin their search in L.A.'s Little Tokyo, the nest of the notorious Japanese mafia, the Yakuza.

Elvis Cole's girlfriend, Lucy, is out of town and she has left her young son, Ben, in Elvis' care. Elvis and Lucy have had a few problems lately - not least over his job as a private investigator. But at last things seem to be getting better. Then Ben disappears. One minute he's playing his computer game in Elvis' house; the next he has vanished. Elvis looks everywhere, but he just can't find Ben; and neither can Lucy when she arrives.

Fifteen-year-old Teri Hewitt has been left holding the babies since her dad disappeared without trace. She wants LA private eye Elvis Cole to find him and although he knows he should refuse and hand it over to social services, he finds himself taking on the case. The search reveals a chronically unemployed drug addict caught up in counterfeiting scams and mixed up with the Russian mafia and Vietnamese gunmen.

Two minutes can be a lifetime. But break the two minute rule and it's a lifetime in jail. Ask anyone on the wrong side of the law about the two minute rule and they'll tell you that's as long as you can hope for at a robbery before the cops show up.But not everyone plays by the rules. When an ageing ex-con finally gets out of jail, freedom doesn't taste too sweet. His son is gunned down in a drive-by shooting.

Quando Devon Connor, mamma single, si accorge che il suo tormentato figlio adolescente, Tyson, maneggia troppi soldi, teme che abbia a che fare con il mondo della droga e decide di assumere l'investigatore privato Elvis Cole per scoprire cosa sta succedendo. Ma la verità è tragicamente molto diversa. Con altri due ragazzi, Tyson è responsabile di una serie di furti di alto livello. Una scelta folle che ha un epilogo mortale quando i tre rubano la cosa sbagliata all'uomo sbagliato, il quale, deciso a recuperare ciò che è suo, assolda due killer spietati, i migliori sulla piazza.

Joe Pike owes a bad man a big favour. And the favor is to protect the life of Larkin Conner Barkley, a spoiled rich girl who happens to be a federal witness in a case against the mob. When Pike and the girl come under intense fire, he hatches a plan: disappear into the anonymous underbelly of Los Angeles, turn the table, and hunt down the hunters.

Elvis Cole has to face up to a crime that takes place far too near home. His girlfriend's only child has been kidnapped, and it seems that something from his own past has come back to haunt him.

Threatened by a raging brush fire, the residents of Laurel Canyon are being forced from their homes. Police and fire department personnel rush from door to door to evacuate the inhabitants, but find something in one of the houses none of them expected: The days-old corpse of a middle-aged recluse who apparently committed suicide. Then comes an even more horrible discovery. Clutched in his lap is a photo album containing photographs of seven young women who have been murdered.

Six months after nearly losing everything to the men who kidnapped his girlfriend's ten-year-old son, Elvis Cole is slowly coming back to life - when he receives an ominous phone call from the LAPD. An unidentified body has been found in a seedy Los Angeles motel room and Elvis is called to the scene. Finally, Elvis is told that before the man died, he said he was Elvis's father.