After muddling around a bit in the first two books, Robert Crais begins to hit his stride with the third entry in the Elvis Cole series. He's dialed back the constant--and what I thought was often inappropriate--humor and produced a fairly gripping novel. The humor hasn't disappeared, to be sure, but in this book it's not nearly as jarring.

The case seems pretty straightforward, at least initially. Elvis is introduced to a big league movie director named Peter Alan Nelson. Nelson is awfully full of himself and comes off as a total jerk. Years ago, he was briefly married and fathered a son. But he decided that being a husband and father really didn't suit him and so he abandoned his wife and child. The wife divorced him and disappeared with the son. Nelson has heard nothing of either of them in years.

Now he decides that he really wants to meet his son and he hires Cole to find the boy and his mother. Nelson is such a jerkoff that Cole almost refuses to work for him. But Nelson does seem sincere in his desire to meet the boy and so Elvis reluctantly agrees.

Finding the woman and her son is really no problem at all. But once having found her, Cole discovers that she's mixed up in some very serious trouble. This is another case where I think that the tease on the back of the book gives away way too much, and I'm not going to go there. Suffice it to say that Cole decides that he needs to attempt to extricate the woman from her problems before notifying his client that he's completed his mission. This will get Cole himself into some serious danger, and before it's all over, a lot of blood is going to get spilled. A very good read with a great climax.