2008-06-25 Short & Sweet

Disney-loving, wise-cracking tough guy Elvis Cole returns in the second novel in the series from Robert Crais in `Stalking the Angel'. Bradley Warren has lost a very valuable thirteenth-century Japanese manuscript, the Hagakure, and hires Elvis Cole, with the help of Joe Pike, to recover it. Elvis and Pike search through Los Angeles' Little Tokyo and the nest of the notorious Japanese mafia, known as the yakuza.

I read Crais' first Elvis Cole novel last year and really enjoyed it and so I've been looking forward to getting round to reading the follow-up and although it's not as good as the original, it is still a great, action-packed detective thriller with some of the best and fastest dialogue I've came across in a series.

The story is fairly faced-paced and has a lot of action from the get-go with some gun battles and martial arts that jump straight out of the page. The mystery regarding the missing book is fairly dull but that isn't the main focus of the story as it does unravel into many other stories as it goes on. Cole and Pike's relationship evolves some more, if a little slowly.

Overall this is a decent read that isn't the best in the series but is short and enjoyable. If this is your first Crais book, I strongly recommend reading The Monkey's Raincoat first.