Elvis has left the city L.

A. Requiem, the eighth and newest Elvis Cole novel by Robert Crais, is like a bride: it brings something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. The old is the familiar pairing of Los Angeles private eye Elvis Cole and his partner, the violent yet noble Joe Pike. The new is that much of this story is told in third-person some from Pike’s point of view and some from an omniscient narrator’s.

The borrowed is the fact that Crais has dipped into other genres to enliven this book. Departing from his standard mystery novel style, he has added a sinister and suspenseful thriller plot element . . . which of course we won’t reveal here. And the blue is the uniform of the LAPD, which plays a very large role in the story as both villain and hero.

With seven solid novels behind him, and a growing legion of fans, why has Crais departed so boldly from what has worked before? Well, like his hero, he doesn’t mind taking risks, if it’s in a good cause. I wanted to write a deeper book, Crais says. The characters have been there for seven novels, but I felt the need to expand. I wanted to push out the boundaries of the way I write detective novels. I wanted a larger book. In length, complexity, depth, and seriousness, he has succeeded. The many twists of the complicated plot take Elvis and Joe deep into Pike’s past, a past that before this book has been only darkly hinted at. Joe’s backstory has been growing for me, Crais says. In general terms I’ve always known the type of home he grew up in. But the specifics of it I created when I was writing. That was one of the many adventures on this book. Elvis’s ongoing relationship with Louisiana lawyer Lucy Chenier also goes through some adventures, as Pike’s problems intrude on her and Elvis in new and dangerous ways. In this book, Elvis has to make tougher personal choices than he’s ever had to make, Crais hints. And Lucy is learning things about Joe that scare her, and then she drops that on Elvis. He has to make a choice. Negotiating Elvis’s psyche and developing a detailed history for the fascinating Pike, a former Marine and LAPD officer, was only one of the challenges Crais faced. The amount of investigative detail in L.

A. Requiem adds police procedural to mystery and thriller in the cocktail that is the book. I’ve done ride-alongs with LAPD for years now, he says. But for this book I learned more about more areas. I needed to know how homicide detectives work at a crime scene, how they interrelate with coroner’s investigators, how Robbery-Homicide differs from a precinct’s homicide desk, how a task force is structured. To assist in that research, Crais called on the fruits of his first writing career for television. After moving to Los Angeles from Louisiana in the 1970s, Crais worked on scripts for many TV shows, including Quincy, Baretta, L.

A. Law, Hill Street Blues, and Miami Vice. The law enforcement contacts and knowledge of police work that he gained have proved invaluable.

Also useful was his family history. Three uncles and two cousins are or were police officers. I know that under the badge police are just like anyone else, except they know a kind of cynical truth about people that they carry with them. This cynicism contrasts sharply with Cole’s trademark optimism. His skills are not in clues and legwork, but in reading people, understanding motivations. Cole can smash down a door or take a villain with the best of them, but his tender side is more evident than his sidearm.

And after meeting Crais, who says all my characters in one way or the other are me, one understands why. Elvis is the work he has aimed for since he was shooting Super-8 movies in his back yard in Baton Rouge, since he wrote short story after short story and got endless rejection slips. Elvis works out, likes to cook, and collects Disneyana. So does Crais.

What is not so apparent is that, as Crais puts it, Joe is me, too. I can use Joe to explore some of the darker corners of me. In this book, though, I reveal to people that Joe is a very human, albeit controlled, person. Most people would point to Joe’s past and say that he’s not a law-abiding person. But Joe is a good man. Crais grew up in Baton Rouge, a town he describes as solidly blue-collar, and one in which a creative kid who writes comics and short stories and who films movies is the craziest kid in town. People don’t grow up there wanting to become writers. Crais broke that mold. When you’re 16 years old and you read Raymond Chandler for the first time, it knocks you over to think that a human being can do that on a page. It’s like making magic. I said that’s what I want to do. He moved to Los Angeles after a series of odd jobs. He studied sample television scripts for format. Without a TV in his house, he hung out in department stores, watching shows and taking notes. Then I started writing scripts, I found an agent through a friend, and eventually one of them sold. But novels were still on his mind, two dust-gathering, self-described horrible manuscripts notwithstanding. Then, in 1985, in a real-life plot twist, Crais’s father passed away.

My mom was terrified. They had been married for 42 years and she had never written a check, never paid a bill. And we went through a period where our roles were reversed. It was while I was wrestling with that that Elvis Cole was born. In The Monkey’s Raincoat, published in 1987, Cole takes a woman named Ellen Lang under his wing after her husband is murdered and her son kidnapped. I like to think that I was given a Calvin and Hobbes transmogrifier that converted me into Elvis and my mom into Ellen Lang, Crais says. That sense of intimate caring, that feeling of assurance that comes through even amid Cole’s wisecracks and attitude, is what makes the series so successful.

L.

A. Requiem ends with Cole musing on the city he calls home, the city that, more than in any other Crais novel, plays a role equal to any character’s. Cole almost revels in the transitory nature of the urban sprawl that is Los Angeles. Crais has the same feelings.

All that stuff that he says at the end, that’s my L.

A., he says. People come here to make their dreams come true. That’s why it’s such a powerful and edgy place. There’s such a sense of transition. Things have to change. Even detectives in novels and the way they are written. Life for Elvis will only get more complicated, Crais concludes.

James Buckley, Jr., is an associate editor with NFL Publishing in Los Angeles. His latest sports book for kids, Eyewitness Football, will be published in September by DK Publishing and the NFL.

Detective Sergeant Romulus Poe, part Paiute Indian and part Mormon, is the lead character in the first in a new series by Los Angeles author Faye Kellerman, known best for her Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus mysteries. Set in Las Vegas, Moon Music is a tour of the desert city as much more than the grown-up playground of today. Decker is the lead investigator in a series of grisly show girl murders. His primary love interest and investigative partner is Hindu pathologist Dr. Rukmani Kalil who, along with Poe’s twin brother Remus, slightly batty Mother, Emma, and high school sweetheart, Alison Jensen, allow Kellerman to introduce themes of mysticism and fantasy along with her respect for religion as a motivating and moderating force in human dynamics.

In an eerie prescience, the plot of Moon Music is entwined with Nevada’s infamous Yucca Flat atomic test site. Emma Poe reminisces about her senior class trip to see the mushroom cloud, They took us there very early in the morning . . . before dawn. It was dark and cold and a little spooky. We had to hunker down in these troughs that the soldiers had dug a couple of years before. We were just these kids, giggling and telling scary things because we were nervous. But we were excited too. . . . Ten! Nine! Eight, seven, six . . . even with my eyes closed and covered with my arms, I still saw this . . . this fantastic burst of light shooting through my skin . . . like God was recreating the universe. And then . . . at the same time . . . you felt this big blast of heat . . . sizzling through your clothes. And when they said you could look up, you did. And there it was. Right there in the sky . . . that famous mushroom cloud . . . what a thrill! Indeed. What a thrill. Not every character in the book is enchanted with the nuclear age, We explode something like a thousand bombs into our atmosphere after exploding only two bombs in enemy territory. Now you tell me. Who came out better, huh? Meticulous documentation of the early detonations at the Nevada Proving Ground are a stark reminder of the days of public innocence the days when support for the atomic program was considered a certain patriotic duty, On January 27, 1951 a one-kiloton bomb named Able was dropped above Frenchman Flat . . . More bombs followed, each one christened as if the government were birthing an infant . . . from Able in 1951 to . . . Little Feller I in July of 1962. Faye Kellerman’s talent for deeply complex characters, riveting action, and thorough research keeps us sitting on the edge of our seat, wide awake late at night. Moon Music is an energizing, terrifying, thought provoking introduction to the Las Vegas of Romulus Poe and Rukmani Kalil. You’ll want to go back often and stay late.

Donna Headrick is a researcher and a columnist for the IntrepidNetReporter.

In The Twisted Root by Anne Perry agent of enquiry William Monk is asked by Lucius Stourbridge to help locate his missing fiance, the widow, Mrs. Miriam Gardiner. Miriam departed a gathering at the Stourbridge estate and, along with coachman Treadwell and the coach and team, vanished. Lucius is crushed; his parents and maternal uncle Aiden Campbell act similarly. But they reveal that Miriam was perhaps a step down in station, over-familiar with servants, and at least nine years their son’s senior.

Presently, the coachman is found murdered, and Miriam is presumed the killer. Monk, an ex-police officer fired for insubordination, believes there is more to the crime. With the assistance of his new wife Hester Latterly, Monk pursues an investigation that, with classic Anne Perry twists, leads into Victorian bedrooms and, eventually, the courtroom. ¦ Tom Corcoran is the Florida-based author of The Mango Opera and the new Florida Keys mystery, Gumbo Limbo, both from St. Martin’s.

Shooting at Midnight by Greg Rucka begins not with the author’s compelling character Atticus Kodiak, but with the bodyguard’s sometime lover, Bridgett Logan. This New York cop’s daughter is a streetwise investigator and recovering addict with a sense of justice and a weakness for drugs. Bridgett is asked to honor a promise made years ago to Lisa Schoof, a fellow down-and-out teenager. But the pledge to help protect her from an abusive ex-lover gets twisted. Lisa wants to murder Vince Lark.

Within hours, Lark has been killed in a shooting gallery, Lisa refuses to speak in her own defense, and Bridgett realizes that her father’s service revolver is missing. Bridgett must risk her life to learn the circumstances of the murder. The investigation exacts horrendous sacrifice, and Atticus is delivered a mysterious summons. To tell more would ruin this gritty novel’s true-to-life suspense.

Tom Corcoran is the Florida-based author of The Mango Opera and the new Florida Keys mystery, Gumbo Limbo, both from St. Martin’s.