HOSTAGE - Scarce Fine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing: Signed by Robert Crais - SIGNED ON THE TITLE PAGE

Crais, Robert

ISBN 10: 0385495854 / ISBN 13: 9780385495851

Published by New York City, NY: Doubleday, 2001

About this Item

1st Printing. Signed. 373 pages. Published in 2001. The author's tenth novel. One of Robert Crais' finest achievements. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Robert Crais' "Hostage". As in hostage-taking. "In a sleepy suburb north of Los Angeles, a convenience-store robbery turns violent. With the police on their tail, three criminals flee the scene and invade a home in an exclusive gated community, taking captive a panicked father and his two children. Police chief Jeff Talley, a former hostage negotiator with the LAPD's SWAT Unit, is now thrown back into the high-pressure world that he has so desperately tried to leave behind. But Talley's nightmare has barely begun" (Publisher's blurb). The basis of the riveting film adaptation by Florent Emilio-Siri, with Bruce Willis and Ben Foster. Robert Crais wrote the screenplay himself. That should be a piece of cake: His previous career as the screenwriter for the long-running television series, "Hill Street Blues" and "L. A. Law", has served Robert Crais well in his second career as a serious mystery/thriller writer. An absolute "must-have" title for Robert Crais collectors. This copy is very prominently, neatly, and beautifully signed in black ink-pen on the title page by Robert Crais. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a contemporary classic. This is one of few such signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: Copies available online have serious flaws, are subsequent printings, or are remainder-marked. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A scarce signed copy thus. One of the finest American novelists of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER ROBERT CRAIS TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 0385495854. Seller Inventory # 10213

Bibliographic Details

Title: HOSTAGE - Scarce Fine Copy of The First ...

Publisher: New York City, NY: Doubleday, 2001

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Fine

Dust Jacket Condition: Fine

Signed: Signed by Author

Edition: 1st Edition.

About this title

Synopsis:

The bestselling author of Demolition Angel and L.A. Requiem returns with his most intense and intricate thriller yet.

As the Los Angeles Times said, Robert Crais is “a crime writer operating at the top of his game.” His complex heroes and heroines, his mastery of noir atmosphere, and his brilliant, taut plots have catapulted him into the front rank of a new breed of thriller writers. Hostage proves his earlier success was no fluke. It’s an unstoppable read.

An ex-con with delusions of grandeur and his tagalong brother unwittingly team up with a psychopath one wrong word away from meltdown. When their late afternoon joyride turns into a random act of violence, they take a family hostage in the affluent bedroom community of Bristo Camino. Enter Chief of Police Jeff Talley, a stressed-out former LAPD SWAT negotiator who is hiding from his past. Plunged back into the high-pressure world that he desperately wants to forget, Talley soon learns that his nightmare has only begun.

The hostages are not who they seem, and the home contains secrets that even L.A.’s most lethal and volatile crime lord, Sonny Benza, fears. As Talley tries to hold himself together and save the people inside, the full weight of Benza’s wrath descends on him, putting the police chief and his own family at risk. Soon, all involved are held hostage by the exigencies of fate and the only one capable of diffusing the standoff is the least stable of them all.

Hostage is a blistering stand-alone thriller with superb characters in crisis, multistranded plotting, and pitch-perfect Southern California sensibility.

Review:

Robert Crais is the real thing: a writer who keeps topping himself. Last year, after eight popular books featuring private eye Elvis Cole (including L.A. Requiem and Voodoo River), he produced Demolition Angel, his first standalone suspense novel. Its complex, multidimensional hero was a damaged cop haunted by her past failures. It worked in that book, and it works even better in this one.

Jeff Talley, the police chief in a small Southern California town, still has nightmares about the young hostage who died when he made the wrong call in his previous job as a negotiator for an LAPD SWAT team. Now, three smalltime punks go on the run after a grocery store robbery and killing in Talley's town. Soon his deputies have surrounded the house where the inept robbers have taken Walter Smith and his two children hostage, and Talley's back in his worst dream again: until the county sheriff's full-fledged SWAT team arrives and takes over, he has to negotiate for their lives.

Crais keeps the point of view moving from Talley to the punks to the hostages as the situation unfolds in the house and on the ground. Then he ratchets up the dramatic tension: there's something in Walter Smith's house that a ruthless Mob boss wants, and he'll sacrifice anyone to get it--which puts Talley's own family in danger. The action speeds to its climax with the velocity of a heat-seeking missile, which makes it almost criminal to slow down long enough to savor the great writing. Take this passage, from a scene when Talley's face-to-face with the man who's holding his own wife and daughter hostage:

Talley ... had stepped into the Zone. It was a place of white noise where emotions reigned and reason was meager. Anger and rage were nonstop tickets; panic was an express. He had been all day coming to this, and here he was: the SWAT guys used to talk about it. You went to the Zone, you lost your edge. You'd lose your career; you'd get yourself killed, or, worse, somebody else.

Crais belongs in that tier of writers whose novelistic gifts transcend the thriller category--writers like Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, and James Lee Burke. Hostage is a breakout. --Jane Adams