The Establishment

The last time Virgil Flowers was in Trippton, MN, the school board tried to kill him. At least this time the homicidal administrators he encountered in 2014's Deadline are behind bars, but the town of Trippton has coughed up another mystery -- and another body -- in the middle of winter, and Virgil is called on to help figure it out in 2017's Deep Freeze.

This time, the victim is Gina Hemming, the Trippton High School Class of 1992's queen bee, who is found in a rare open patch of water on the frozen river, after she was killed and her body dumped. The last people to see her alive were some classmates helping to plan the class reunion, and since this is Trippton there's a decent chance the killer is one of them. But as a bank president, Gina had been able to develop other potential enemies, so even the class reunion committee isn't a slam dunk.

Exactly who the killer is, how the murder happened and how Gina's body ended up in a river some distance from her home are all things Virgil will have to find out in the midst of an icy small-town Minnesota winter. While trying to help out a private investigator who's looking into the creation of of ersatz talking Barbie dolls that have a rather different set of sayings than those parents want to hear from kids' toys, which may wind up being the more dangerous job.

Freeze is fun and a little better put together than Deadline, rolling its B plot into the main narrative a lot more smoothly than that novel did. "Sandford" is the pen name of Minneapolis reporter John Camp, so the description of the folks and scheme caught up in the Barbie knockoffs carries a lot of authentic features. And he continues to use realistically schlubby people as criminals rather than posit every backwoods hamlet as the home of a Master Criminal Genius.

It limps a little because of some needless salacious details about Gina's private life and more sympathy for the B-plot criminals than they merit given their own threatening moves. But the more disciplined narrative and the attention to the main thread help it to being one of the better novels in the series since the first few books.

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First Tyson Connor started flashing much more cash and expensive material than any teenager should have. His working mother Devon didn't quite believe his stories about where it all came from but she couldn't prove him wrong. Then Tyson disappeared, so Devon has come to Elvis Cole to find her son. As Elvis digs deeper into exactly what Tyson and his friends have been doing, he learns that the kids themselves may not know what kind of trouble they have stirred up, nor who else is chasing them down. Even with his friend, the tough guy's tough guy Joe Pike along, there's no telling if Elvis can extract Tyson from the mess he's in. Or get out of it with his own skin intact.

The Wanted is the 17th novel featuring Elvis and Joe (three of the series have Joe as the POV character). Crais has been able to maintain his wit and keep Elvis in top form as a wisecracker. His penchant for Hawaiian shirts and Disney-character office accessories makes him seem deceptively lightweight until he has to pick up his end of a scuffle or bad-dude staredown. It's one of the things that's helped distinguish him from Robert B. Parker's Spenser. Pike is there to be stoic or menacing as necessary and he fills that role well; Crais doesn't make the mistake of using things we've learned about Pike from elsewhere to flesh him out if Elvis doesn't already know them.

That said, The Wanted isn't on the high end of the Cole-Pike series. For one, its pair of stalking hitmen owe more than a little to Jules and Vincent, but lack enough of the Travolta-Jackson charisma to make them amusing or interesting. For another, Tyson is a thoroughly unlikable little twerp whose friends are lightly sketched stereotypes that are even harder to like than he is.

Crais has been up and down through the course of the series, with some top-level work and some stuff that seems like setting the word processor on autopilot, so there's no reason to suspect Wanted signals a downturn. But its subpar status does make a reader a little more eager for the next volume and a little bit of redemption.

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Ex-Mossad operators Aaron and Shoshana don't officially work for the government of Israel any more. Which means they do things the Israeli government wants done but doesn't want anyone to know they want them done. Pike Logan and the operators of the Taskforce know how that kind of game works, since they do it every day. When Aaron disappears and Shoshana is the target of an assassination attempt, the Taskforce's routine surveillance of an arms dealer turns out to be a deeper and more dangerous mission than they thought. Not in the least because working with Shoshana could be just as lethal as working against her and because the Taskforce's oversight board has no interest in the matter beyond stopping an arms deal. The fate of Aaron and the ultimate design of the plotters is not their concern. But it is Pike's. Guess whose vision wins out.

For his 12th tale of the Taskforce, retired special forces officer Brad Taylor didn't hang his story on an item from news headlines. He tried instead to spin up a yarn on his own, which makes for more focus on our characters than on explaining the evil plot, which is pretty simple at its base. It's a nice change of pace but doesn't reduce the suspense thriller mayhem level all that much. When Pike tries to rein in Shoshana's almost instinctive bloodlust, he's reminded of the same tendencies in himself and recognizes how Aaron is the Israeli assassin's link to humanity the way his partner and teammate Jennifer is for him.  It's not a literary-level exchange but definitely owes a lot to Nietzsche's abyss and what happens when one gazes into it too long.

The plot doesn't hold together as well as some of the other Logan tales that have real-world headlines as a peg; Taylor seems to work better with that kind of anchor. And Shoshana's anxiety-inspired mania starts to wear on a reader about two-thirds of the way through the book, especially when an episode of it seems to follow immediately after another declaration of belief in Pike and his plan. But a little extra work on the people he's been telling us about is welcome, and there's a fun little episode in the middle of the story that retells one of the mishaps Taylor had when researching it. If Taylor's next novel also leans a little more heavily on character than plot, well, he'll probably be better at it the second time around. And if it doesn't we have some more depth to our team of heroes and a little more reason to care about what their dangerous missions may cost them even when they survive.