Book Review: Taken by Robert Crais (Cole & Pike #15)

Stars: 3 out of 5

Pros: Fast moving thrill ride

Cons: Shallow characters; content more brutal than needed

The Bottom Line:

This kidnap thriller

Contains a fast paced story

Shallow characters

Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Track the Taken

I’m zeroing in on the final few books in the Elvis Cole and Joe Pike mysteries from Robert Crais, at least until I am caught up and can read new books as they come out.  Which brings me to Taken.  It’s a non-stop thrill ride, but one that reminds me why this series isn’t always one of my favorites.

Elvis Cole, private investigator in Los Angeles, is hired by Nita Morales to find her daughter Krista.  Krista and her boyfriend, Jack, disappeared several days ago.  Nita has received a ransom call, but she was only asked for $500.  Surely, this is just Krista and Jack trying to get some money from Nita so they can elope, right?  Nita has no use for Jack and is sure that he put Krista up to it.  All she wants is for Elvis to figure out where they have gone and return her daughter.

However, Elvis quickly begins to determine that Krista and Jack are in serious danger.  They were in the wrong place and got captured by a gang that kidnaps illegal immigrants trying to get into California.  But knowing what happened to them only increases the stakes.  Can Elvis and his partner, Joe Pike, find the two young adults and rescue them before it is too late?

If you are looking for a fast-paced thriller, this is definitely the book for you.  The book grabs you from the beginning and never really slows down.  The ending, while beautiful, doesn’t linger too long either.  We get the scenes we need to wrap things up and that’s all.  Meanwhile, you will be frantically turning pages to find out what happens next.

Really, you can think of this book as an action movie, just in written form.  That’s exactly what this book feels like as you read it.

Unfortunately, that comes with some serious downsides.  One is the shallow characters.  I don’t mind that so much with an hour and a half or two hour action movie, although it can be a drag on the movie.  But in a book where I’m spending significantly more time?  I expect a little more depth to the characters.  Since this is the fifteenth book with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike, we do know them quite well at this point, but even they weren’t as well rounded as they could have been.  And the rest of the cast?  They are fairly flat.  We definitely care about Krista and Jack, and it is enough to pull us into the story, but they could have been fuller characters.  There are a lot of bad guys in this book, and the fact that they aren’t better defined makes it hard to keep track of how they all fit together.

Robert Crais tries something different with this book.  While the action takes place over the course of a week and a half or so, he tells it in shifting time periods.  One chapter, we will be with Elvis, the next Jack and Krista a few days before, then Joe Pike a few days in the future.  This technique works to increase the tension, but it makes it very hard to synch up what is happening when.  This is especially true since he doesn’t use the same standards for separating the time periods, so you almost need to take notes to remember what is happening to who when.  I get that he needed to do some of this to tell Krista and Jack’s story while also letting us know how Elvis is doing in tracking them down, but I wish he could have picked a better way to do this so we could track it.  Also, he used this to spoil what I think would have been a pretty major twist early on, which actually takes some of the tension out of the early part of the book as a result.

Of course, I wasn’t super happy hearing Krista and Jack’s story.  They are being held by some very bad men, and we get to know the details of their captivity.  I have often complained about how graphic these books can be, and this is another case where less would have been more.

Also, I could have done with less foul language.  Once again, I felt like he had a swear word count in his contract.  Some characters can hardly talk without swearing.  Ironically, it seemed to lessen as the book reached the climax.  You’d expect it to be the other way around, right?

I’m still listening to these books on audio.  The edition I listened to was narrated by Luke Daniels, who has done some of the other books in the series.  He gets a little over dramatic a few times, especially if characters are panicking or under stress, but other than that, he did a great job of keeping me pulled into the story.

Not that it is hard.  Yes, I have listed issues I have with the book, but it is hard to deny that this is a major thrill ride that will have you constantly engaged no matter how you consume the story.  I got this audio book from the library because I was expecting to be doing a lot of driving over the course of a few days, and I’m very thankful I got it when I did.  I was able to finish it over the course of 5 days, over half of it listened to on one day, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be kept in suspense any longer than that.  If I’d been reading the book, I probably would have skimmed over a few of the scenes that bothered me, but I would have devoted much more time to reading to see how it all ended and finished it even faster.

Despite the flaws, I did enjoy Taken.  However, those flaws will keep me from giving it my full recommendation.

Be sure to check out the rest of the Elvis Cole and Joe Pike series.