I've turned to Crais before when I've been wishing I could read a Micael Connelly, but the last couple books I've read have been terrible. This is little more than a Bruce Willis action/revenge movie. The character Joe Pike is a cipher; an impossibly adept killing machine who kills without compunction and will do anything to achieve his goal--oh and hey, it is all justified because he saves the kid in the end and the bad guys get it.

I love mysteries and can enjoy crime fiction, but books like this make me despair as an anarchist. I firmly believe that the stories a society tells itself help shape not only the character and ethics of that society but inform or even justify the actions taken in that society. So what effect has the tens of thousands of cop shows, books, and movies where the "ends justify the means" and violence against the "scum" isn't worth an ethcial qualm? Do you get a country with the more people incarcerated than in any other country? When a disproportionate number of the bad guys in fictional stories are black or other people of color, does this lead to a society where blacks and other people of color are locked up at disproportionate rates? Do you get cops that will gun down people like Sean Bell or Oscar Grant? A country that will invade two countries and slaughter tens of tens of thousands with little protest or reaction from its society? After all, Saddam was a "bad guy" right?

Sigh.