Suspenseful Thriller Introduces Policewoman With a Painful Past

For his previous novel, "L.A. Requiem," Robert Crais ignored the conventional wisdom that you shouldn't fix anything that isn't broken. Though his series featuring private detective Elvis Cole had been steadily growing in popularity, Crais opted to give the formula a twist. He shifted narrative devices, toned down his hero's flippancy and pushed a supporting character, Cole's enigmatic partner, Joe Pike, into the spotlight. The result was a psychologically complex, mature novel that put the author onto bestseller lists.

Now, in "Demolition Angel" (Doubleday, $24.95, 323 pages), he eschews the series entirely in favor of a powerful, self-contained novel of suspense that has the compactness, velocity and effectiveness of a well-aimed bullet.

One of "Requiem's" pleasant surprises was a different sort of character for Crais, a troubled, hard-boiled homicide cop named Samantha Dolan, who came close to stealing the novel from both Cole and Pike. She may have been an early working model for the fully realized, painfully human policewoman at "Angel's" heart. Carol Starkey is a former bomb-squad technician haunted by the explosion that killed her partner and lover and left her scarred in mind and body.

Three years after that disaster, which is when we meet her, she is a self-loathing, burned-out, boozing bundle of neuroses struggling through a half-life as a detective in the LAPD Criminal Conspiracy Section. Her chance at redemption comes in the guise of a new bomb-squad death that she's tapped to investigate. The fatality appears to be the work of Mr. Red, a lethal explosives savant whose capture is the special project of a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms investigator named Jack Pell.

Pell is a modern Capt. Ahab, so obsessed with harpooning Red he purposely neglects to tell Starkey that she's the bomber's next target. It's not exactly an auspicious start to a love affair, but while Pell waits for Red to start stalking the demolition angel, Cupid manages to get a clear shot at these walking woundeds.

Crais brings off an affecting bittersweet romance without putting the brakes on his pell-mell pacing or sacrificing one shiver of suspense. This is a thriller that works on every level, a pivotal work from a crime novelist operating at the top of his game.

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