"The Forgotten Man" by Robert Crais

 A whodunnit murder mystery thriller with a difference: the dead victim claimed to be the investigating PI's long lost father. This is the tenth novel featuring PI Elvis Cole but the first that I have read so I might have missed some of the nuances but there is a typical cast of cops and criminalists who, as per genre, wisecrack their way to solving the mystery. The usual low life characters too. A fairly well-written but otherwise standard example of the genre.

Selected quotes:

• "That's the first thing you learn when you work with the dead: We're gone when we no longer cry." (Ch 2)
• "Maybe we each felt our baggage was lighter without the weight of someone else's concern." (Ch 10)
• "That's what you need at eight in the morning, a pimp assuming the moral high ground." (Ch 17)
• "The feeder streets were stop-motion parking lots, advancing one frame at a time. Pedestrians moved faster; cyclists blew by at warp speed. So much for life in the fast lane." (Ch 22)
• "The Salton Sea was the largest, lowest lake in California, filling the broad, flat basin of the Salton Sink like a mirror laid on the desert floor. It was shallow because the land was flat, and surrounded by barren desert and scorched rocks like some forgotten puddle in Hell." (Ch 26)

June 2022; 342 pages

Also starring Elvis Cole: Most Wanted

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God