Digging up problems

The Last Detective is Robert Crais's latest novel about his Los Angeles private detective, Elvis Cole, whose work is putting a strain on his relationship with his girlfriend, Lucy Chenier.

She didn't like it when she and her 10-year-old son, Ben, were threatened by a murderer Cole was pursuing, and now she, understandably, likes it even less when Ben is kidnapped, apparently in revenge for an atrocity Cole is alleged to have committed in Vietnam.

Cole and his usual sidekick, monosyllabic ex-marine Joe Pike, team up with police detective Carol Starkey - a cigarette smoker (nowadays always a sign of a disturbed personality) and the heroine of Crais's earlier novel, Demolition Angel - to find the boy.

Compared with the hard-edged work of writers such as Michael Connelly or James Crumley, Crais's Elvis Cole novels have always seemed a little softfocus, inclined to whimsy and sentimentality.

The violence has been stepped up here, there's a neat twist to the plot, the narrative gradually ratchets up the tension to the limits of the endurable, and the final showdown could hardly be more exciting.

But any novel that replays the idea of Home Alone, even if it is as thriller rather than comedy, is going to have something slightly mushy about it.