Pun Salad

Using Amazon's "Look Inside" function, I verified my suspicion: as usual, Robert Crais's title doesn't have much to do with the goings on in the book. There's one occurrence of "indigo" referring to colored ink ordered for illegal purposes; no slamming of it is involved. Although there's a considerable amount of other slamming: doors, bullets into doors, moths into lamps, bodies onto the pavement outside Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland.

It's the seventh book down on my "Reread Crais" project, 15 left to go. (There's a new one coming out in November 2022, so I'll have to fit that in somewhere too.)

A prequel sets things up: a Seattle father and his three children, are being evacuated from their home by US Marshals. But it's a much closer shave than they'd like: a marshal is gunned down by bad guys while bravely to buying time for the escape.

Three years later, the kids are knocking at the door of Elvis Cole, the World's Greatest Detective. Their dad has been MIA from their home for eleven days, without notice. But they're not telling him everything. Understandably, they don't tell him about the violence in Seattle. But as it turns out, dad has his own reasons for disappearing from everyone. Not only the criminals who want to kill him, but also the Feds that are trying (ostensibly) to keep him alive. Elvis eventually susses this all out, but not before getting threatened, beat up, threatened some more…

Elvis's taciturn partner (and violent force of nature), Joe Pike, is along for the ride, having Elvis's back as always. Also playing a major role is Lucy from Louisiana, who's looking to land a job in Los Angeles so she and her son Ben can be close to Elvis. And there's a complication involved there, too. If I recall correctly, that gets played out in the next book…