Robert Crais, A Dangerous Man

 Robert Crais, A Denageous Man
Copyright © Robert Crais 2019
G. P. Putnam & Sons
ISBN 978-0-525-535-68-3

I think I have read almost everything that Crais has published, and I know I’ve read all of the Elvis Cole/Joe Pike books.  He writes—and plots—extraordinarily well, but the books are sometimes difficult for me, because of the level of violence in them.  A Dangerous Man is an outstanding book, and I read it in essentially one sitting, carried along by the characters and by the events.  But the violence is sure there.

But I’m not actually going to write a review of the book—but do read it; it’s very, very good.  I do want to discuss at a little length a couple of things that I kept thinking about after I finished the book.  The first involves the McGuffin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin), the theft of $19 million by the mother of the principal character (non-Cole/Pike division), Isabelle (Izzy) Roland.  The second is…call it a moral dilemma, the nature of which I will try to make ckear.

Izzy’s parents are both dead; she has inherited the house she grew up in, a small bungalow in a middle-class neighborhood.  The main action of the story begins as she is leaving the bank in which she works—she is accosted by a stranger and forced into a car driven by a second man.  Pike, who had just left the bank, rescues her.  We soon find out that someone thinks Izzy has $19 million that her mother is believed to have stolen years earlier (when the mother was working as the bookkeeper for shady doctor—and, apparently, they think it’s in the bungalow, which they search thoroughly.  But Izzy claims no knowledge of that fortune.  Leaving all of that aside, I found myself struck by the logistics of hiding $19 million in a bungalow.

My two immediate thoughts were—gold?  Or $100 bills?  And I had to work that out.  The current price of gold is about $2,000 per Troy ounce; two years ago, when Crais would have bee writing, gold would have been about $1,400 per Troy ounce.  Converting that to “english” ounces, gold would have sold for about $1,275 per “english” ounce.  That’s 930 pounds of gold.  Seems like it would be hard to miss that.

So I tried $100’s.  $19,000,000 would be 190,000 $100 bills.  Maybe not as heavy as the gold.  But how about bulk?  A stack of 250 bills would measure about 3”x6”x1”.  That’s 760 packets of $100 bills, or 13,680 square inches, or 380 cubic feet, or a space roughly 7feet by 7 feet by 7 feet.  Which would be hard to conceal and harder to overlook.

And if the money had been stashed, slowly, over time, in stocks and bonds (etc.), then searching the house would be a waste of time.  (And, also, it seems unlikely that Izzy, whose name was listed on the accounts, had not heard from her mother’s financial adviser(s).)  In any event, there’s a weirdness here that served to actuate the plot, but that is hard to accept.

But that’s just a side issue.  There is, at the core of the story, a pair of moral issues, one involving Izzy’s mother, the other involving Joe Pike.

Izzy’s mother stole $19 million.  Granted, she stole it from two sleazeballs peddling worthless and potentially lethal “pharmaceuticals” to whoever that could con into it.  And the sleazeballs were working with a Mexican drug lord.  Izzy’s mother (and father) rolled on the sleazes and wound up in the witness protection program.  But they apparently never considered finding a way to make any restitution to the people who were mal-treated, made sicker, or died while the scam persisted.  The moral issue, to me, is Should Izzy do what her mother did not do, try to ameliorate the situation of the victims, or keep the money for herself?  That question is never raised.  The assumption seems to be that the money is, without any moral question, Izzy’s.  I found that a little hard to accept.  Well, a lot hard to accept. 

And then, Joe Pike.  After the original troop of bad guys has been arrested or (mostly) killed (in a legitimate use of lethal force), in the coda to the story, Pike takes a trip to Mexico, finds the drug lord, and murders him.  I can’t use the term “execute,” because, to me, that implies an action with some legal sanction.  There is no legal sanction for Pike’s actions.  Was Pike’s action morally acceptable?  I realize that this is not an easy question.  (For example, as long as he’s alive, Izzy is likely not to be safe.)  But for me, accepting that action as morally acceptable is, well, not possible.  Did the drug lord deserve to die?  Well, probably.  Would he have died when he did (when he did) without Pike’s action?  Obviously not.  Would he have continued to commit—or pay others to commit—criminal actions, actions that under any possible consideration would be morally abhorrent?  Obviously he would.  Does that allow us to accept what is legally an act or murder with equanimity?  Speaking only for myself, I have a lot of trouble with it.  (And it’s easy for me to say this, because it is a hypothetical case, and my choice has no consequences,)  But once we begin to say “An extra-legal killing of that guy is OK,” we’re sliding down the slope.

I go back to the years after our wars in Iraq, and the people we tortured in the name of making the world safer.  Does it?  Does our government sanctioning torture make the world safer?  Or does it sanction Russia placing bounties on US military personnel?  Does it sanction the use of poison gas Syria?  Does it allow us to turn a blind eye to the excessive use of force by our police?  Does it allow more and more people, with more and more weapons of greater lethality to claim that their use of those weapons is always OK?

I don’t know.  I do know that the ending of A Dangerous Man left me profoundly troubled.  Which may have been Crais’ intention.  Or maybe not.