The Forgotton Man

I wanted to read a mystery set in present day L.A.  I’ve read several mysteries set in L.A. 10-20 and 40-50 years ago by authors Michael Connelly and Walter Mosely.  My first choice for a present day L.A. mystery, Twisted by Jonathan Kellerman, wasn’t at the Covina Public Library despite the online catalog saying it was.  A book reviewer for the L.A. Times has written that Robert Crais is to Los Angeles what Tony Hillerman is to the New Mexico and Arizona desert.  I’m a fan of Tony Hillerman and I decided to try a Robert Crais book based on that reviewer’s comparison.  The Forgotten Man was published in 2005 and takes place around that time.  It’s not the first in the series, but one of the more recent.

The main character of The Forgotten Man, Elvis Cole, is a private detective who lives in an A-frame house on Laurel Canyon.  Much of the story is told in the first person from Cole’s point of view.  He’s a transplant from Chicago, similar to the author, and has a fairly cooperative relationship with the LAPD.  Cole is called in to help with a case to which he takes a personal interest.  As he delves deeper he finds that nearly everyone involved has deep secrets waiting to be uncovered.  He’s always making offhand wisecracks in his narrative about how he never gets cell phone service, police procedures, and the tendencies of some of the lowlifes he meets.  About Central Community Policy Station he comments, “Like other police stations in Los Angeles, it was known as a Division until someone decided that Division made the police sound like an occupying army.  Now we had community police stations, which sounded more user-friendly.”

The story does seem to take place in present day L.A.  The detectives use computers, the Internet, and other technology.  Everyone has a cell phone.  However, parts of L.A. have changed so much just in the past few years that some passages still seem dated.  One is: “The Big Empty was a moldering area east of the convention center and south of the business district, unclaimed by the homeless, who tended to gather several blocks north at the parks and missions of skid row.”  I believe there are now several adaptive reuse and new ground-up condo and apartment complexes in that so-called “Big Empty.”  I wonder if the story is really outdated or if the author, who lives in Santa Monica, just hadn’t been to downtown very recently.
 
There were a few other references that I know something about.  One mentions people fishing for tilapia and corvina near the Salton Sea.  Just before I read this passage I had seen corvina as a special menu item at Malbec (see earlier review).  The description on the Malbec menu said it was Chilean sea bass.  Who knew Chilean sea bass came from the Salton Sea?  Another passage mentions Abita root beer that’s not widely available in L.A. but in this case, “imported” from the Deep South.  When I was looking for sodas I could drink that did not have high fructose corn syrup, one that I tried was Abita root beer that I found at BevMo.  It was good, but I eventually settled on Virgil’s root beer since it’s more widely available and it has a smoother flavor.

The author uses an interesting technique where he combines Cole’s first person narrative with some third person narratives of other characters.  It made me as the reader feel like I was approaching the mystery from different directions, like I knew more than the characters, but not quite enough to figure it all out.  Having the different perspectives added to the suspense towards the end.