It starts out simple enough. A 15-year-old girl and her two younger siblings hire Elvis Cole to find their father who has been missing for eleven days. The situation becomes extremely complicated from there. If you were to plot this story on a graph, it might end up looking like a spider's web. But Crais makes it work. This book was originally published in 1997 and reissued in 2003. It's a fast and entertaining read.

3 1/2 to four stars - definitely not five. A counterfeiter who acted as a government witness against Russian gangsters in Seattle is put into a witness protection program in Salt Lake City by Federal Marshalls. He disappears, along with his three children. Three years later, his children appear in Elvis Cole's office wanting him to find there father. They had been living under a new name in Los Angeles, and he went out 11 days earlier and has not come back. His oldest daughter, fifteen-year-old Teresa, has a wad of cash. Events move on from there.

The story is generally well written as Elvis looks for the father, encounters bad guys, finds the father, loses him again, and eventually finds him again. Along the way, he discovers other people are looking for the man, including the Russian gangsters and the Federal Marshalls Service. The Secret Service is also interested, and the FBI becomes involved along with the local police. In a side plot, Elvis also has to deal with his girlfriend's ex-husband.

There were, perhaps, too many twists added to the end of the story, and it became a little unreal. Also, the author's description of Seattle settings seemed a little off. Has he ever visited the city? He also keeps referring to Los Angeles hills as mountains. Perhaps he has never seen a real mountain.

Little less detail than others. Not that I didn't enjoy this novel just not as riveted as before. Perhaps because Ive read later work.

I've read nearly the entire Elvis Cole series by Robert Crais and although his characters are wonderful and likeable, each book seems to be a hit or miss proposition. Indigo Slam had a somewhat interesting premise; the father of 3 children has disappeared and his children hire Cole to find him. The man turns out to be a counterfeiter in the witness protection program who is on the run from the Russian Mafia and involved in several other illegal deals as well.

The main problem with the book is that Crais just rushed through everything as if he were writing in his sleep. Most of the new characters were shallow and undeveloped, the action scenes were predictable (if you've read one Elvis Cole book, you know that the big shoot-out at the end of the book repeats itself over and over and over) and even Elvis Cole's trademark humor just felt flat and weak. With a little more careful thought, this might have been a good book. As it was, though, it just ended up putting me to sleep.

It was plant day in Los Angeles, at least that what Private Investigator Elvis Cole calls the day of the month that he waters his dying plants. Elvis isn't good with plants. Anyway he's busy caring for them when Teresa, Charles and Winona Haines walk into his office. They want Elvis to find their father. Elvis doesn't work for children, so he sends them away. However, after they leave he realizes that he's screwed up. The kids were obviously in trouble, had come to him for help and he'd failed them. He rushes downstairs in time to see fifteen-year-old Teresa pull away from the curb. He dashes to his car and follows, thinking that the girl, who is too young to drive, has a lot on her young shoulders.

He decides to help the children and Teresa pulls a wad of hundred dollar bills from her purse, but he tells her he won't take money from her, she insists and he accepts two of the bills and leaves, thinking it'll be an easy job. But as usual in a Robert Crais detective thriller, things are not always as they seem.

Elvis goes to the print shop where Charles Haines, the errant father, works and finds out he was fired because the boss caught him shooting up. The kid's father is a junky and that's the last thing Elvis wants to tell them. From the phone bill he learns Charles called Seattle several times, so he flies up there on his own nickle, asks questions and is kidnapped, beat up and almost killed by Russian mobsters who want to know why Elvis is asking question about Charles, who's last name by the way isn't Haines, but Hewitt. Fortunately he's saved at the last minute by U.S. Marshals who want to know the same thing.

Elvis figures out that Charles had flown the coup from the federal witness program. That he was a big time counterfeiter and that some very bad guys want him dead and that they'll kill anybody who gets in their way. Fortunately, Elvis has his pal, the quiet and broody Pike to watch his back.

And thus it begins, the twists and turns of a Robert Crais novel where, as I said above, nothing is as it seems. Just when you think you've got a handle on the story it takes a quick right turn and you're slapping yourself upside the head, murmuring, "Why didn't I see that?" INDIGO SLAM, like every book Robert Crais has written, is a five star read, one that won't let you sleep, eat or go to work until you finish, it's that good.

Reviewed by Vesta Irene