Elvis and the Funny Money: "Indigo Slam" by Robert Crais

Indigo Slam - Robert Crais

When your office is invaded by three kids in the middle of the day, you begin to suspect you have a problem. The oldest of the three, 15-year-old Teri Haines, contracted with Elvis Cole to find her father Clark. Daddy had disappeared eleven days earlier, and his children hadn't heard a peep out of him. Elvis Cole, World's Greatest Softy, quote a $200 price for the search. Teri peeled a couple of Benjamins off the fat roll in her purse and handed 'em over.

Since the trail led to Seattle, Cole (and partner Joe Pike) were a couple hundred dollars down in a hurry. What they learned there was that Clark Haines was really Clark Hewitt, on the run (with his three motherless kids)  from the U.S. Marshal Service and the Pacific Northwest branch of the Russian Mob… for counterfeiting. Oops, the $200 Teri had paid him turned out to be funny money.

Back in L.A., Daddy turned up - and then promptly disappeared again. Never one to leave three kids in the lurch, Cole and Pike put them in a safe house and went on the search for Daddy. Where they found him and what else they found was… interesting. With the Russkis on his trail and a gang of Vietnamese counterrevolutionaries looking over his shoulder, Elvis Cole has some planning to do.

Good thing he's the World's Greatest Detective! Indigo Slam is the seventh novel of Robert Crais' Elvis Cole/Joe Pike series, and the third to feature Cole's romance with Cajun lawyer Lucy Chenier. Interspersed through the first-person narrative are moments in which Cole and Chenier plan her impending relocation to LA, over the strenuous objections (and meddling) of her ex-husband back in Baton Rouge.

As always, Cole's style for this novel - originally published in 1997, but re-released in ebook form in 2014 - is an unusual blend of self-deprecating humor and violent conflict. Of course the contrast between the chatterbox Cole and his taciturn partner, Pike, is a signature feature of the series, as is the two detectives' capable handling of bad guys - bare-handed or armed with massive firepower. What's different in Indigo Slam (a name with no connection to the story) is the vision of not only Cole's soft and nurturing side, but Pike's as well - who knew!

Though fast-paced and alternately funny and frantic, Indigo Slam doesn't necessarily mark the high point in the Cole/Pike series. It pretty much moves things forward and gets Lucy on her way to LA, but the plot's only mildly believable and the final twist is just a little too contrived.

Still, a step along the way that readers new to the Elvis Cole series need to get under their belts.