My next venture into a power rotation author has Elvis Cole wondering if he screwed up 3 years ago. It’s fire season in LA (I guess the other season is mudslide season) and the cops are evacuating Laurel Canyon (did they knock on Mickey Haller’s door?). A neighbor says the house across the street has an invalid in it so he’ll need help. The cops bang on the door and when they enter they find the remains of a 5-day old suicide. At his feet is a photo album containing pictures of women at right about the time they painfully died.
The dead guy was accused of a murder 3 years earlier (of one of the women in the album). His lawyer hired Elvis to track down his alibi and sure enough, the alibi checked out so the accused was set free. After that, 3 more women died. What did Cole miss that let this guy go and continue killing? An ass’t chief shows up at the scene and almost immediately pronounces that 6 or 7 cold cases have now been solved.
Elvis is now wondering what went wrong and despite being told in no uncertain terms to cease digging into the past, our boys Cole and Pike bull their way into stuff better left hidden. So he goes back into each of the old cases trying to learn as much as he could but comes up mostly blank on any kind of pattern. No one is much help. Not the lawyer he worked for, the families, the cops, the CSI dude, not the former bomb tech who seems to have the hots for him, no one can help because this chief has put a lid on it all.
A number of minor clues point to a firm that handles political careers. So Cole wonders if the chief is covering up something to do with this firm (whom the chief has retained for his own political aspirations) or other clients of said firm. One of female victims worked there and there were rumors of issues with a well-heeled client.
Cole is spun around so many circles it’s hard to figure out how he manages to break out and zero in the most likely answer. What was it Holmes said? When the improbable has been eliminated, all that remains is the probable?
Terrific story. Cole and Pike - two of the best guys to escape with. A cover-to-cover winner. Great literature? Nope. Great fun? Absolutely.
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