Robert Crais - Hostage (2001)
Jeff Talley, ex-SWAT hostage negotiator, fled the LAPD after one tense, deadly standoff too many. Now he's working as the police chief of a small department in the fictional town of Bristo Camino, a suburban bedroom community of Los Angeles. Talley thinks he's left the pressure and violence of the big city behind; the stress and strain that ruined his career and his marriage. He is wrong.
Three losers decide to stick-up a convenience store in search of a quick buck or two. When the robbery goes violently wrong, the sad sack criminals seek shelter in a nearby house, taking the family who live there hostage in the process. Mistake! The man who owns the house just happens to be the accountant for a Palm Springs mobster – and being captured by the police would be preferable to falling into the hands of these wiseguys.
Hostage has a solid premise and interesting characters for the most part. One of the problems I had with the book, though, is that the hero of the story, Chief Talley, was too conflicted, too unsure to give the reader a satisfactory rooting interest. I found myself wanting the man to quit whining and just do his job. We're all used to the protagonist with the troubled past facing and overcoming his demons in the course of saving the day. It's a good premise for a suspense novel. In this case, though, Talley's demons are more annoying than haunting, and some of his thoughts and actions are less than inspiring.
Fortunately, this is not enough to ruin the story, even if it does weaken it. The one thing that comes closest, though, is the ending. I don't know if Crais ran out of ideas or simply ran out of gas, but the climax of Hostage is one of the worst examples of an improbable, unsatisfying, deux ex machina ending you're likely to find in a thriller. I still don't know exactly what happened and why. The weakness of the closing leaves a sour taste in the reader's mouth as the last page turns.
I don't mean to suggest that Hostage is a bad book, or even an unentertaining one. It's neither of those. It was, however, a bit of a disappointment for me. Although I enjoyed reading it, Hostage was unexceptional enough that it might have been written by a couple of dozen writers in the genre. There was nothing distinctive enough about it to make it stand above the fold. I expect more than that from Robert Crais. He's an author whose books I've come to anticipate and admire over the past several years as he has grown and improved as a writer. Based on his previous two books – L.A. Requiem and Demolition Angel – I regard him as being one of the best in the business. I wouldn't say that this is a step backwards, but it was not the confident stride ahead that I had hoped for.
Posted by David J. Montgomery in Book Reviews | Permalink
