I want my two (hundred) minutes back.
Just days before his release from prison, career bank robber Max Holman's life is turned upside down when his son, now a police officer, is gunned down with three other cops under strange circumstances. Max tries to figure out what happened but gets nowhere on his own. The only person he can turn to: the woman who put him away!
Sounds pretty good when I say it like that. Too bad it wasn't. I love Robert Crais. I did not love this book. In fact, I tossed it less than halfway through.
On the surface, the book sounds like a winner. Elmore Leonard or George Pelecanos could have crafted quite a yarn from such a plot. My problem with the book was with the characters. I didn't care about Max Holman, I didn't care about his dead son, and I sure didn't care for the FBI agent that put him away that he was destined to tumble into bed with, Katherine Pollard.
Max Holman didn't have much of a personality outside of his regrets over the past. The book (or the portion I read) reads like Crais was afraid to make Holman too much of a criminal or something. Instead, he made him a loser with no personality. 200 pages with Holman was more than enough. Since I'm a 50-75 page an hour guy, I couldn't see spending another three or four hours on this.
Maybe it was just the wrong time but I kept thinking over other books I'd rather be reading or other household tasks I could be doing instead of pushing through The Two-Minute Rule. While I liked Hostage and Demolition Angel, Crais should probably stick to Cole and Pike. Crais should have definitely wrote another Elvis Cole when he was working on this.
Two stars. This book is getting converted to store credit at my earliest convenience.
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