Hostage

Rating:
Summary: Taut, Tough, Crime Drama
Review: No wasted words in this one. Crais grabs you by the throat in the first chapter, setting the stage with a hostage incident that went awry years earlier, and leading to Jeff Talley's voluntary retirement from the LAPD SWAT team to Chief of Police in a quiet southern California town. When a convenience store robbery in Talley's town goes bad, a new hostage situation develops, and a reluctant Talley is drawn back in to the fray.

While Crais' strength is tight plot development and rapid-fire action that keeps the pages turning, "Hostage" is also rich in character development. Talley, haunted by the bad decision that forced him from LA, is vulnerable but likeable, and believable in his flaws and foibles. Mars, one of the young punks central to the hostage situation, while perhaps predictable, is ominous and threatening in his sullen silence: a younger version of the big blond psycho thug in "Fargo" comes to mind. A family held hostage, the FBI, organized crime, small town cops: it all comes together and works much more successfully than any of the more popular suspense novels on the shelves today.

I found "Hostage" nearly impossible to put down. The central plot was expertly woven with a number of parallel sub-plots; the dialogue tight and realistic. Crais succeeds again in demonstrating why he is one of today's premier writers of the genre. Don't miss it!

Rating:
Summary: Hostage is a wild ride
Review: Another great diversion while waiting for Elvis Cole to return! Crais has really come into his own as a powerful storyteller. He has the cop and criminal mindset down as well as Wambaugh or any of the others. This book kept me tied up for a whole day, with no breaks in the action or the suspense. Slightly weak in its resolution, it is still a great ride! If you liked Demolition Angel, this one is just as enjoyable and gritty.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I love Crais' work, for the most part. I rush to get the latest book, but with this one I was bummed. No story depth, flat characters, and predictable. I look forward to the next book, but may holdout for the paperback.

Rating:
Summary: The pages kept turning.....couldn't put it down!
Review: Loved this book! Gotta read it!

Rating:
Summary: Like watching an action-packed movie without soul
Review: Kinda bored to this writer's never changed writing format. What I need and would like to see is that Crais should try to write with certain deeper feelings instead of just incidents, cases, half-developed characters. Short of certain deep feelings is always the problem of this writer. His stories never moved or touched me deeply, just like watching an action packed movie with lot of explosions, digitalized graphics, stunts, dying people as victims, white-trash criminals....etc., etc. But once the lights are up again, you just get up like all other movie goers and exit. Your ear drums still ringing with the horrible sound effect. Crais books are always like this; readable but always short of something. They didn't make the readers think or ponder, or make them feel more complete, more mature and, more gratifying like reading those of by Connelly, Deuterman, Diehl, Block. I'd be very much appreciated that Crais may someday give me a "deeper" story intead of merely "COPS" stories like what we used to watch on tv. Sorry, man, you are a good writer, but you could be better.

Rating:
Summary: One complication too many...
Review: This is, for most of the ride, a darned good thriller. The story begins with an account of an LA hostage negotiator in a situation that will haunt him forever, and it may haunt me for a while, too. Crais doesn't play up the gory aspect, what bothered me was the trip inside the negotiator's mind, figuring out what's going on about two steps behind the character. It was believable and horrifying.

When the story shifts to the here-and-now, we find ourselves in the company of Dennis Rooney..., his younger brother Kevin (probably described by most who know him as "a wimp, but not a bad kid") and Mars, who would be giving Dennis the creeps if Dennis was bright enough to pay attention.

The trio rob a convenience store for no particular reason -- it seems like a good idea to Dennis, Mars doesn't offer any objections, and poor Kevin is in the truck with them and can't talk his brother out of it. You get the distinct impression that this is par for the course for Dennis and Kevin, but Dennis really ought to be thinking harder about Mars's reaction.

Predictably, the crime goes awry. Not "predictably" as in an objection to Crais's writing, but predictably in the sense that you just know any plot with Dennis at the helm is going to go bad, and soon. The three attempt to steal a getaway car and end up holding a family hostage. Talley, the negotiator from the prologue, gets called in to deal with them. Since the events of the prologue, Talley has left the LAPD and his family life is in disarray. Portrait of the Negotiator In Crisis -- and I believed that.

So far, so good. But the family in the house has mob connections, and the mob has reasons to want to control the outcome of this situation -- and at that point I started to get impatient.

I liked Talley, who is a believable character with a believable problem. I liked the kids being held hostage, who can't believe what's happening to them and who react to each other as brothers and sisters might. I even liked poor hapless Kevin, who left the house that afternoon thinking he was going to the movies, and who, because he's a lot brighter than his brother, knows this is going to end badly. I believed Dennis, with his eternal self-justification and efforts to come up with a plan to save himself -- I just didn't believe he was going to succeed. And I was creeped out and interested in Mars. I just didn't have anything left for the mob subplot, in which Talley finds himself negotiating for his own family as well as the one in the house. I didn't care about the mobsters, and I wondered whether there could be another way for Talley to find redemption and put his life back together.

As the story spins itself out, more is learned about Mars, who is decidedly not someone with whom you'd enjoy being trapped in a house. Thomas, the young boy hostage, is seen to be brave and resourceful. Kevin finally gets up the nerve to do the right thing despite the fact he's more scared of his brother (and Mars -- because Kevin is brighter than Dennis) than he is of the cops.

And then Crais just dumps them! Okay, we know what happens to them, and it's spectacular and all, but hey! I was invested in those people! I'd just spent a couple of hundred pages with them, and I didn't want to walk away and forget about them. We eventually get back to the kids, Thomas and his sister Jennifer, but Mars, Dennis, and Kevin vanish from Crais's thoughts, and I wasn't interested enough in the people who replaced them to make up the lack. I wanted SOMEONE to spare them a backward glance. They weren't likable (okay, Kevin was, in a half-starved-pup kind of way) but Crais made me feel for them, even when what I felt was loathing, and I was angry at him for not giving me some sort of coda to acknowledge that they had existed.

The fact that I am still so worked up about this several days later obviously means something. I will certainly read more of Crais's novels, and if this one ends up a movie, as some have suggested, I'll go and see it. But I really would have preferred a story about a straight-up negotiation between Talley and the folks in the house, dealing with the complications inherent in that. Of course, I don't read books about mobsters anyway.

Rating:
Summary: Intense! This crime novel is hard to put down....
Review: Set in suburban Southern Calif. Jeff Talley is Chief of Police, former LAPD SWAT negotiator, trying to forget ghosts of the past. He is forced back into action as a situation develops in his normally quiet high-class little town outside of L.A. Three small time punks rob a mini-mart, the owner ends up dead, and the robbers take off, to be left stranded by a disabled vehicle. They take cover in a large home in an affluent neighborhood, where they take a family hostage, a father and his two children. They pick the wrong house to take refuge in. As the story unfolds we see that others are interested in what could be found in that house and what lengths they will go to, to protect their secrets from surfacing. This is my first time to read Robert Crais. I think he is very good. Reminds me of James Patterson in that his chapters are short and intense. His characters are totally believable. He keeps the reader involved, with Talley, the punks and the hostages. Something keeps happening in each chapter to make you want to turn the next page. I read it in two sittings, and will definitely be looking at his previous novels.

Rating:
Summary: Hostage
Review: As a Robert Crais fan I found this to be probably one of his best written. He moves from the Elvis Cole wit to the more hard hitting reality of Elmore Leonard or John Sanford. From the very first page this story grabbed and held me without any letup. The characters were absolutely believable as was the unfortunate situation they found themselves in. A must read.

Rating:
Summary: A great hostage novel
Review: This is a wonderful novel of suspense. It is the best hostage novel i have read ever, apart from Jeffery Deaver's A Maiden's Grave, echoes of which can be heard in this work.

This is a fast-paced book, with a great plot. Crais takes it a step-up from a nomral hostage thriller, adding extra dimensions to the plot and developing it into much more than just a seige thriller.

Jeff Talley is a great character, and one which i would love to read more of. He is slightly flawed, but he is basically just a good man trying to do the right thing in a situation which he himself doesn't really want to be in.

Right from the beginning until right to the end this is a great hostage thriller, with some great characters, and a great twist. You shouldn't miss it. It reads at break-neck pace, and is very satisfying.

Rating:
Summary: Non-stop action
Review: Jeff Talley, unable to take the strain of his negotiator job with the SWAT unit, retired to a sleepy town as the police chief. Peace was shattered when three robbers took a family hostage while fleeing the robbery. Talley soon realized that the family was not the only hostage in the standoff and it would need all his calm, wit and courage to untangle the mess.

I enjoyed reading the book thoroughly, although I have the nagging suspicions that it might have been written with the big screen in mind. The only complaint I have is the abrupt ending, which left many things unaccounted for, including the reasons why certain characters in the book were ¡§owned¡¨.