Where do I start? I want to like Robert Crais. I don't think he writes badly. I don't think he plots badly. I don't think his characters are bad. But none of them are good enough and every aspect of his work seems endemically infected with stereotypes. I picked up the Elvis Cole series on the eighth book and I thought the ending was lousy but I reckoned that it wasn't written for me. It was the kind of ending a long time series reader could live with. After eight books you can forgive your heros for acting heroically and in the interests of truth, justive and the American way. This however was a standalone book. Everything known about these characters and all the justification for the twists in the plotline has to be between these covers. Our heroine was once dead. For a couple of minutes after a bomb exploded her heart stopped and she was saved by paramedics. She was a bomb technician seeking to defuse that bomb. So was her lover. He died and the same time she did but he didn't get resucitated. I think it's fair enough to find our heroine, several years later, still a bit freaked out by this and with some alcoholic leanings. She's now a detective with the LAPD and her current case involves finding the person who planted another bomb that has killed another bomb technician. So far we have an interesting story and it could have easily been a good one. There were numerous elements to the story that were interesting and orginal but I don't remember those. What i do remember, though I've forgotten some of them, is how many cliched elements there were to this story. There was a federal agent who wasn't really a federal agent. There was the rural cop who overlooked something obvious to the city cop. There was the perpetrator killing off the informant. There was the... oh, I'd be here hours if I went through them. None of them were major problems on their own, but strung together I felt like I was being subjected to the results of the 'How to Write a Thriller 101' course. When our heroine has her police shield removed from her three chapters from the end I shut the book in disgust. There are books I like in spite of their faults. This isn't one of them.
Demonlition Angel starts with a BANG! and this review starts with a lame pun.What looks like a routine defusing of some gangbanger’s pipe bomb left in a dumpster turns into a showering of body parts when the explosive ignites suddenly, completely annihilating a bomb squad technician. Carol Starkey is the detective assigned to the case, which quickly turns into a pissing contest with a self-aggrandizing lunatic who calls himself Mr. Red, and who wants to blow up enough places and people so that he gets his fifteen minutes of fame on the Top Ten Most Wanted List. Unfortunately for Starkey, she is no stranger to being blown up and dying—it kind of happened to her a few years back when she was a technician herself. These days she is a nervous alcoholic wreck that can barely keep her shit together. While she is actually a good cop, everyone on the force knows that she is getting to stick around out of sympathy.This is Crais’s first novel that neither stars nor mentions his two usual leads, PI’s Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, and is also the first of his books to be written entirely in third person. While Crais has dabbled with third person narrative shifts in previous books, for the most apart these experiments were unsuccessful. (Except for the Joe Pike flashbacks in L.A. Requiem.) This time around everything moves along smoothly enough: the action focuses almost entirely on Carol’s investigation, but will occasionally take breaks to give a spotlight on Mr. Red or show a few important scenes involving supporting characters.All in all, Demolition Angel is an entertaining thriller with a few unconvincing “Gee, I know we just met and all, but, my God, I am in love with you” scenes. But for the most part Crais gets it right and gives us a strong female lead with a hot mess of traumatic hang-ups and social anxieties, a competent plot with some surprises along the way, an appropriately flamboyant and nasty baddie, and more than a few scenes of shit getting blown up real good.What more can any good American want?
A very good mystery and fair mini-romance book by Robert Crais. Carol Starkey has been in several of Crais' books but has never been the main character. An interesting villain by the name of Mr. Red is introduced. The book is mainly about bombs used as weapons, but something that I had never considered, also used for specific targets as small as even for one person. Carol Starkey used to be a bomb technician for the police department. While involved with deactivating one, she was blown up, died and was brought back to life. Now she she sees a shrink, is a chain-smoker and drinks on the job, constantly taking Tagaments. She can no longer work as a bomb technician but is now working on bomb investigations. She gets called to the scene of a crime, where a fellow bomb technician is blown up. Assigned the lead, her supervisors are still wary of her being put on a case where bombs are involved. A mysterious ATF agent arrives to help her. Carol's past as a bomb technician and her excellent skills as a detective work to her advantage in solving this mystery but not before risking everything.
—Susan McChesney
This standalone novel is mid-booklist of the growing Crais bibliography, and introduces police detective Carol Starkey (who will appear from time to time in later stories in small parts). Starkey is a former bomb squad expert whose partner was killed in the same explosion that almost took her life – she was actually heart-dead for several minutes before being revived. Now a detective, she’s working a case where another bomb expert has been killed in an explosion, but soon signs point to a probable homicide. A federal agent, John Pell, comes to assist on the case, and for the first time since her “death” three years ago, Starkey develops a romantic interest in Pell, which contrasts mightily to her other habits, including three packs a day, a bottle of gin, and Tagamet for most “meals”! The plot thickens when it appears a “Mr. Red”, apparently a well-known bomber who has eluded police all over the country, may be a factor in Starkey’s case. Her pursuit of minutia leads to rather amazing developments in the case.We were generally pleased by the tale, typical of our reaction to Crais’ work. Starkey is not particularly that lovable, although she’s very smart, intuitive and persistent; and her interactions with other characters and Pell were well crafted by the author. The story itself is plenty suspenseful and rather twisty at the end. We would probably be a little more enthusiastic if there had been less details about bomb making and fewer transcriptions of instant messaging chat sessions (more of a novelty in 2000, the year published); but all in all, an entertaining book we enjoyed well enough.
—Jerry
This was a pretty grim book, since the heroine, Carol Starkey, is a tortured-soul bomb investigator for the LAPD, and she "died" in a bomb case that actually did kill her partner. She was revived and deals with the scars and demons from that demolition. Her go-tos are cigarettes (nearly constant) and gin (her hydration of choice), so she must smell pretty dreadful. She works so hard at being a tough customer - brusque, cold, unsociable - that I found it hard to root for her. Likeable? Nuh-unh.She, though, is a dogged and clever detective, on the hunt for the bomber who blew up another member of the bomb squad as the book opens. Is this the work of the insane Mr. Red, maker of MDX-based pipe bombs? There are a lot of cigarettes, gin, sleeplessness and despair that shroud her search and her nascent relationship with Pell, the ATF agent who horns in on the case. Of course there is resolution in the end, but on the way to that there is a lot of gloom and angst.This book did not include either Elvis Cole or Joe Pike, recurring characters in Mr. Crais' novels; I've encountered Starkey in at least one of them, though I now cannot remember which. I prefer those two guys to this gal, and I'll steer clear of Starkey-only novels if there are any more.
—Nancy
