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Overview
Carol Starkey is struggling to pick up the pieces of her former life as L.A.’s finest bomb squad technician. Fueled with liberal doses of alcohol and Tagamet, she’s doing time as a Detective-2 with LAPD’s Criminal Conspiracy Section. Three years have passed since the event that still haunts her: a detonation that killed her partner and lover, scarred her body and soul, and ended her career as a bomb tech.
When a seemingly innocuous bomb call explodes into a charred murder scene, Carol catches the case and embarks on an investigation of a series of explosions that reveal chilling intentions. The bombs are designed expressly to kill bomb technicians. Now, as the one tech who survived the deadliest of blasts, Carol is in for the most perilous fight of her life. . . .
Praise for Demolition Angel
“Terrific . . . explosive . . . [a] high powered thrill ride.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Gripping . . . Crais piles on plot twists . . . gathering the separate threads at the end and igniting them like a string of fireworks.”—People
“A powerful, self-contained novel of suspense that has the compactness, velocity, and effectiveness of a well-aimed bullet . . . This is a thriller that works on every level, a pivotal work from a crime novelist operating at the top of his game.”—Los Angeles Times
“Fascinating and frighteningly believable . . . Starkey is one of the toughest characters to grace the crowded field of thriller books in a long time.”—USA Today
“A flammable techno-thriller with the kind of force that knocks out windows.”—The New York Times Book Review
"Packs an explosive punch. Though the pace of the book moves like a quick-burning fuse, Crais still takes the time in Demolition Angel to sketch out some memorable characters: Starkey, haunted and hollow-eyed, covering up her pain with a Bogart-tough demeanor; and John Michael Fowles (aka Mr. Red), a sociopath who gets all sorts of information from the Internet without breaking a sweat. . . . Crais keeps things wound so tight that readers will be getting paper cuts in their rush to finish this one.”—The Denver Post
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307567376 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/22/2009 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 55,858 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Hometown:
Los Angeles, CaliforniaDate of Birth:
June 20, 1953Place of Birth:
Baton Rouge, LouisianaEducation:
B.S., Louisiana State University, 1976; Clarion Writers Workshop at Michigan State UniversityWebsite:
http://www.robertcrais.comRead an Excerpt
PROLOGUE To be disrupted: when the human body is blown apart; as by the pressure force of a bomb. —Gradwohl’s Legal Medicine
Code Three Roll Out Bomb Squad Silver Lake, California
Charlie Riggio stared at the cardboard box sitting beside the Dumpster. It was a Jolly Green Giant box, with what appeared to be a crumpled brown paper bag sticking up through the top. The box was stamped green beans. Neither Riggio nor the two uniformed officers with him approached closer than the corner of the strip mall there on Sunset Boulevard; they could see the box fine from where they were.
“How long has it been there?”
One of the Adam car officers, a Filipino named Ruiz, checked his watch.
“We got our dispatch about two hours ago. We been here since.”
“Find anyone who saw how it got there?”
“Oh, no, dude. Nobody.”
The other officer, a black guy named Mason, nodded.
“Ruiz is the one saw it. He went over and looked in the bag, the crazy Flip.”
“So tell me what you saw.”
“I told your sergeant.”
“Tell me. I’m the sonofabitch who’s gonna approach the damned thing.”
Ruiz described seeing the capped ends of two galvanized pipes taped together with silver duct tape. The pipes were loosely wrapped in newspaper, Ruiz said, so he had only seen the ends.
Riggio considered that. They were standing in a strip mall on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, an area that had seen increasing gang activity in recent months. Gangbangers would steal galvanized pipe from construction sites or dig up plastic PVC from some poor bastard’s garden, then stuff them with bottle rocket powder or match heads. Riggio didn’t know if the Green Giant box held an actual bomb or not, but he had to approach it as if it did. That’s the way it was with bomb calls. Better than ninety-five percent turned out to be hairspray cans, some teenager’s book bag, or, like his most recent call-out, two pounds of marijuana wrapped in Pampers. Only one out of a hundred was what the bomb techs called an “improvised munition.”
A homemade bomb.
“You hear ticking or anything like that?”
“No.”
“Smell anything burning?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Did you open the bag to get a better look?”
“Hell, no.”
“Did you move the box or anything?”
Ruiz smiled like Riggio was nuts.
“Dude, I saw those pipes and shit my pants. The only thing I moved was my feet!”
Mason laughed.
Riggio walked back to his vehicle. The Bomb Squad drove dark blue Suburbans, rigged with a light bar, and crammed with all the tools of the bomb technician’s trade, except for the robots. You wanted the robots, you had to call them out special, and he wasn’t going to do that. The goddamned robot would just get bogged down in all the potholes around the box.
Riggio found his supervisor, Buck Daggett, instructing a uniformed sergeant to evacuate the area for a hundred yards in all directions. The fire department had already been called, and paramedics were on the way. Sunset Boulevard had been closed, and traffic rerouted. All for something that might turn out to be some do-it-yourself plumber’s castoff drain trap.
“Hey, Buck, I’m ready to take a look at that thing.”
“I want you in the suit.”
“It’s too hot. I’ll use the chest protector for the first pass, then the suit if I have to bring out the de-armer.”
All Riggio would be doing on the first pass was lugging out a portable X-ray to see inside the bag. If the contents appeared to be a bomb, he and Daggett would formulate a game plan and either de-arm the device, or explode it in place.
“I want you in the suit, Charles. I got a feeling about this one.”
“You’ve always got a feeling.”
“I’ve also got the sergeant stripes. You’re in the suit.”
The armored suit weighed almost ninety pounds. Made of Kevlar plates and heavy Nomex batting, it covered every part of Riggio’s body except his hands, which remained bare. A bomb tech needed the dexterity of unencumbered fingers.
When the suit was in place, Riggio took the Real Time RTR3 X-ray unit and lumbered toward the package. Walking in the suit was like walking with his body wrapped in wet quilts, only hotter. Three minutes in the armor, and sweat was already running into his eyes. To make it worse, a safety cable and hardwire dragged behind him, the hardwire connecting him to Daggett via a telex communicator. A separate wire linked the Real Time to a computer in the Suburban’s cargo bay. He felt like he was pulling a plow.
Daggett’s voice came into Riggio’s ear. “How you doing out there?”
“Sweating my ass off, thanks to you.”
Riggio hated this part the most, approaching an object before he knew what it was. Every time was the same: Riggio thought of that unknown object as a living beast with a life and a mind. Like a sleeping pit bull. If he approached it carefully and made the right moves, everything would be fine. If he startled the dog, the damn thing would rip him apart.
Eighty-two slow-motion paces brought him to the box.
It was unremarkable except for a wet stain on one corner that looked like dog piss. The brown paper bag, crumpled and uneven, was open. Riggio peered into the bag without touching it. Leaning over was hard, and when he did, sweat dripped onto the Lexan faceplate like rain.
He saw the two pipes that Ruiz had described. The pipe caps appeared to be about two-and-a-half inches in diameter and taped together, but nothing else about them was visible. They were loosely wrapped with newspaper, leaving only the ends exposed. Daggett said, “How’s it look?”
“Like a couple of pipes. Stand by. I’ll get us a picture.”
Riggio placed the Real Time RTR3 on the ground at the base of the box, aimed for a side view, then turned on the unit. It provided the same type of translucent shadow image that security personnel see on airline baggage units, reproducing the image on two screens: one for Riggio on top of the RTR3 and another on the computer back at the Suburban.
Charlie Riggio smiled.
“Sonofabitch. We got one, Buck. We got us a bomb.”
“I’m seeing it.”
The two pipes were impenetrable shadows with what appeared to be a spool of wire or fuse triangled between them. There didn’t appear to be a timer or an initiator of a more sophisticated nature, leading Riggio to believe that the bomb was a garage project made by an enterprising local gangbanger. Low-tech, dirty, and not particularly difficult to de-arm.
“This one’s going to be a piece of cake, Buck. I make a basic fuse of the light-it-and-run-like-hell variety.”
“You be careful. Might be some kind of motion switch tucked away in there.”
“I’m not gonna touch it, Buck. Jesus. Gimme some credit.”
“Don’t get cocky. Take the snaps and let’s figure out what’s what.”
The procedure was to take a series of digital computer snaps of the device via the Real Time at forty-five-degree angles. When they had the device mapped, Riggio would fall back to the Suburban where he and Daggett would decide how best to destroy or de-arm it.
Riggio shuffled around the box, aiming the Real Time over the different angles. He felt no fear as he did this because he knew what he was dealing with now and trusted he could beat it. Riggio had approached over forty-eight suspicious packages in his six years with the Bomb Squad; only nine had been actual explosive devices. None of those had ever detonated in a manner that he did not control.
“You’re not talking to me, Charlie. You okay?”
“Just got to work around the potholes, Sarge. Almost done. Hey, you know what I’m having? I’m having a brainstorm.”
“Stop. You’ll hurt yourself.”
“No, listen to this. You know those people on the infomercials who make all that money with the stupid shit they sell? We could sell these damned suits to fat people, see? You just wear it and you lose weight.”
“Keep your damned head with that bomb, Riggio. How’s your body temp?”
“I’m okay.”
In truth, he was so hot that he felt dizzy, but he wanted to make sure he had good clean shots. He circled the box like a man in a space suit, getting front, side, and off angles, then pointed the Real Time straight down for a top view. That’s when he saw a shadow that hadn’t been visible in the side views.
“Buck, you see that? I think I got something.” “What?”
“Here in the overhead view. Take a snap.”
A thin, hairlike shadow emerged from the side of one pipe and extended up through the spool. This wire wasn’t attached to the others, which confused Riggio until a sudden, unexpected thought occurred to him: Maybe the spool was there only to hide this other wire.
In that moment, fear crackled through him and his bowels clenched. He called out to Buck Daggett, but the words did not form.
Riggio thought, Oh, God.
The bomb detonated at a rate of twenty-seven thousand feet per second, twenty-two times faster than a nine-millimeter bullet leaves the muzzle of a pistol. Heat flashed outward in a burst of white light hot enough to melt iron. The air pressure spiked from a normal fifteen pounds per square inch to twenty-two hundred pounds, shattering the iron pipes into jagged shrapnel that punched through the Kevlar suit like hyperfast bullets. The shock wave slammed into his body with an over-pressure of three hundred thousand pounds, crushing his chest, rupturing his liver, spleen, and lungs, and separating his unprotected hands. Charlie Riggio was lifted fourteen feet into the air and thrown a distance of thirty-eight feet.
Even this close to the point of detonation, Riggio might have survived if this had been, as he first suspected, a garage bomb cooked up by a gangbanger with makeshift materials.
It wasn’t.
Bits of tarmac and steel fell around him like bloody rain, long after Charlie Riggio was dead.
Interviews
Meet LAPD Detective Carol Starkey, the wonderfully drawn heroine of Robert Crais's explosive new thriller, Demolition Angel. An ex-bomb tech whose horrible scars tell her grim story all too well, Starkey's a loose cannon who drinks, smokes, and spews venom at anyone who invades her space. But behind this rigid exterior, Starkey's a fragile woman whose insecurities and haunting dreams ceaselessly torment her. But now, with one colleague dead and a mad bomber on the loose, Starkey must confront her own painful past in order to track a killer who gets his kicks when cops go up in flames. Barnes & Noble.com editor Andrew LeCount recently spoke with the Edgar- and Anthony-nominated Robert Crais (L.A. Requiem) about his exciting new novel, the challenge of writing from the female perspective, and the big-budget Demolition Angel-based film that's already in the works. Enjoy.
Barnes & Noble.com: So, there's quite a buzz surrounding your new novel, Demolition Angel -- especially from Hollywood. Can you give us the up-to-date scoop?
Robert Crais: Well, Demolition Angel was bought by Laurence Mark, the producer of Jerry Maguire, As Good as It Gets, Simon Birch, and Romy and Michele's High School Reunion -- just a ton of really successful, terrific pictures. Larry saw Demolition Angel in manuscript -- he's over at Columbia TriStar -- wanted it, made a real heavy move-in, and we worked out a deal. They own the film rights and I'm writing the screenplay.
Barnes & Noble.com: Are you excited to be writing the screenplay?
Robert Crais: Oh yeah, I'm thrilled. You know, with a project of that magnitude, normally they're looking at A-list screenwriters. But what the heck, it was my book and I wanted to write it.
Barnes & Noble.com: I always seem to hear from authors whose works are being adapted to film that they feel alienated by the moviemaking process. It's nice to hear that's not happening in this situation.
Robert Crais: Yes, it's been wonderful working with Larry and Jonathan King -- who's the president of Larry's company. I've had a couple of meetings and phone conversations with them, and I've found those guys to be really easy and creative collaborators; they've had terrific ideas. In manuscript, Demolition Angel was like 630 pages long. Now I've got to compress it down to a 120-page screenplay. There's a lot of work to be done.
Barnes & Noble.com: And how's it coming along?
Robert Crais: This is my first experience adapting one of my own novels as a screenplay. I've had quite a bit of Hollywood experience, mostly writing television, so I'm familiar with the script form, and I'm comfortable with it, but it's a whole different thing -- I'm now finding -- when it comes to adapting your own work. But at the same time it's kind of thrilling, because the book had been finished and I had left Carol Starkey's world, and this is a great way to be back in it again and relive those moments with her.
Barnes & Noble.com: I can certainly see why the movie folks gobbled it up. It lends wonderfully to cinema.
Robert Crais: I'm excited. And I think you're right -- I think it'll make a terrific motion picture. Carol Starkey is such a vibrant and telling character. As a film, we'll have a wonderful opportunity to really cast a top, first-rate actress.
Barnes & Noble.com: Any personal faves for the part?
Robert Crais: Well, I don't know if I have personal favorites. Certainly there are actors who come to mind in the different roles. Most of the discussion has been about the major leads: Carol Starkey, Jack Pell, and Mr. Red. For Carol you're talking anyone from Sandra Bullock to Jodie Foster to Ashley Judd, and I'd be happy with any of these people. For Jack Pell you're talking about George Clooney -- a role that will be expanded for the movie. And for Mr. Red you're talking about actors like John Malkovich, who I would personally just love to work with. He's just a wonderful actor all the way around.
Barnes & Noble.com: What was your inspiration to write a female lead?
Robert Crais: Actually, there's a couple of things for me. My books have been changing over the past few years. L.A. Requiem, though it was an Elvis Cole and Joe Pike novel, was substantially different from the earlier Elvis Cole/Joe Pike novels. The books have been growing as the way I want to tell stories has been growing. The first seven books were fairly traditional detective novels: first-person, from Elvis Cole's point of view. L.A. Requiem blew the lid off that. It was multi-character, multi-viewpoint. It wasn't just a detective novel, though it was a detective novel. It was a police procedural; it was also a suspense thriller. For me, writing L.A. Requiem was like opening a series of doorways. It really expanded my horizons as to the types of stories I wanted to tell, the types of books I wanted to write, the types of tests I wanted for myself as a writer. Have you read L.A. Requiem?
Barnes & Noble.com: Yes, I have.
Robert Crais: Then you're familiar with Samantha Dolen. I've always had a reputation for writing strong female characters, but they've all been seen through Elvis Cole's eyes, because that's the point of view of the books I've been writing. After writing L.A. Requiem, I wanted to take the next step in this evolution, I guess you'd say, and that was to write a full-blown suspense thriller. I wanted to write something completely different from the books I'd written before. Since my first eight novels are all from a male point of view, and I loved Samantha Dolen so much, I wanted to change completely. When I say, "And now for something completely different," I mean it. So, I wanted to go with something I hadn't done before, and that was to sustain an entire novel about this strong, conflicted, tragic, damaged woman. And I've got to say, it was an adventure. It was a great good time for me to write and spend time with her.
Barnes & Noble.com: You mentioned how your Elvis Cole novels are primarily from the first-person perspective. Demolition Angel is from a third-person perspective.
Robert Crais: Yes. I wanted to approach Demolition Angel from a third-person point of view, start to finish. I experimented with that in L.A. Requiem, which was a split book -- part of it is from Elvis Cole's point of view; the other half is third-person points of view from various characters. I found that writing third-person accounts is a very energetic way to write -- and a very liberating way to write. And that's what I wanted to do from start to finish in Demolition Angel, to tackle it in third person. I'm still in the heads of the different characters, it's still a multi-character point of view, but there seems to be a great deal of energy and forward momentum that can be had in third person. It's a lot of fun for me to do that.
Barnes & Noble.com: Before we get ahead of ourselves, let's talk about the novel itself. Who is Carol Starkey?
Robert Crais: Carol Starkey is a former LAPD bomb technician who was actually "killed" on the job. She was clinically dead for a little over two minutes and resuscitated -- brought back. The job is the only thing she has in her life; she's currently working as a detective for the Criminal Conspiracy Section. She couldn't be back on the bomb squad herself, that wasn't allowed, so she's doing the next best thing: She's a bomb investigator, which is what the Criminal Conspiracry Section with the LAPD does. Bomb techs de-arm bombs and deal with the actual devices; the Criminal Conspiracy Section investigates those who build bombs. That's what Carol's doing now.
Barnes & Noble.com: And who is Carol's prime adversary?
Robert Crais: In all seriousness, it's herself. When we pick her up in this book, Carol Starkey is falling apart. Something really terrible happened to her three years ago -- that's when she was blown up on the job. She's never recovered from that. She's holding herself together by drinking way too much gin, chain-smoking cigarettes all day long, eating antacids because she's in a constant state of conflict, fear, and tension. She's coming apart, but she hides it from everyone. She won't even go to an LAPD psychologist for counseling -- she goes to private counselors. She doesn't let on to anyone in her professional life that she has no personal life; everything that she was ended on that day three years ago. What I wanted to do was take a character like that, watch her struggle with those things, then see if she could rebuild herself.
Barnes & Noble.com: What fascinated you about bombs in the first place?
Robert Crais: The first time I got interested in bombs was when I was researching L.A. Requiem. Because L.A. Requiem is a police procedural, which I hadn't written in the past, I wanted my procedure to be accurate, so I set about researching all the different aspects of murder crime scenes and how homicide investigators do their work. One of the things that that entailed was speaking with criminalists; plus, I wanted to see the SID (Scientific Investigations Division) labs and get a feel for them. Well, it just so happens that the SID offices share grounds with the LAPD bomb squad. So, when I visited SID, sitting in the parking lot were all of these bomb squad Suburbans and a group of bomb techs walking around in their black commando fatigues; it's a small group but there they were -- there's all this hardware, there's all this technology that I'd never been exposed to, and I grew fascinated by it. And that planted the seed. I said "You know, there's a book there." It's too bizarre a life for a book not to be there.
Barnes & Noble.com: You speak of "chronics" in Demolition Angel -- those who keep going back to bombs. Did you speak with real chronics while researching?
Robert Crais: I didn't meet any actual chronics, but I learned of them and spoke at length about them with bomb techs on the LAPD. I went to the bomb squad, spent some time there, interviewed several bomb technicians, interviewed the commander of the LAPD Bomb Squad, even went back to Washington, D.C. where I spent time speaking with the ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) Explosives Division to get their input. But while I was talking with the bomb techs here in Los Angeles, they mentioned this whole notion of chronics. I'm fascinated by bizarre psychology and here, clearly, was a form of obsessive compulsive behavior, very much akin to arson. Chronics are people who are so drawn to this obsession -- to making things that blow up -- that they literally destroy themselves; even that doesn't stop them. By the way, chronics are not mad bombers who are saying "let's go blow up a Barnes & Noble"; most of these people don't want to harm anyone, they just want to make something blow up. They'll go out to the beach where there's no one around, just to set off something; or they'll go out to the desert and blow up an old car; it's not like they're the Unabomber -- they're not. They're just mentally ill people; just like people who set fires, these are people who must make really big firecrackers even though, over time, they end up blowing themselves apart. The more I found out about this world, what's known as the "bomb community," I became increasingly fascinated.
Barnes & Noble.com: How would you describe a bomb technician?
Robert Crais: If I had to liken them to anything, I'd say they're puzzle people. This is totally my supposition here: One of the things that appeals to them is the whole puzzle aspect. Here's this unknown device; bomb techs are very much personally challenged by the notion of de-arming that device. Here's a puzzle that someone else has built. My job is to undo the puzzle so that no one gets harmed. There's something about that physicality that appeals to bomb techs. I don't think that anyone goes into this job with some kind of double-Y chromosome, ultra-macho notion of "I wanna risk my life." The bomb techs I met seem to be extremely calm people and very professional -- and absolutely confident that they could undo any puzzle -- any machine -- that someone else had built, and I think that's the challenge and appeal.
Barnes & Noble.com: Are bomb technicians in Los Angeles busy?
Robert Crais: You know what, the reality is no, not that much. The vast majority -- not just in L. A., but I think everywhere -- of call-outs for bomb squad are simply harmless boxes, bags of whatever that were left and abandoned, that turn out to be nothing. Then, when it's an actual munition that could pose a danger, the vast majority of those call-outs are really for stuff such as -- say your Uncle Harry stole a couple hand grenades when he got out of the Marine Corps, and now someone's found them in the garage and they don't know what to do with them, so they call out the bomb squad. Or, say Uncle Harry stole a mortar round -- it's in the attic, "Oh my God, what're we gonna do?" So bomb squad goes out. Very, very few call-outs are what's known as an "improvised munition," wherein some kook has actually constructed what you and I would look at and say, "That's a bomb." But, of course, that happens...
Barnes & Noble.com: The Internet plays a large roll in your novel. With the advent of the Internet, is bomb-making more prevalent?
Robert Crais: The Internet certainly makes it easy to have bomb-making information. As part of my research, I went on the Internet searching for bomb websites and this kind of information; in the course of a couple of days, I printed off 300 pages of bomb designs, bomb plants, chemical formulas, chemical equivalents, on and on and on and on. It's there. Look at the kids from Columbine -- that's what they were doing. But, of course, the government knows it's all there too; they're aware of it. It appears to me, though, that there's no way to really control it; the Internet isn't set up that way, so it's there and it's a problem.
Barnes & Noble.com: Did you find Internet chat forums as described in Demolition Angel?
Robert Crais: No, that was a fabrication. I don't know if such a chatroom exists, but if someone told me that such a chatroom did exist, I would buy it. The notion grew out of my learning from a sex-crimes detective here in Los Angeles that such chatrooms exist on the Internet for pedophiles. There are secret chatrooms, which can be gotten to if you know where to look and how to enter them, where pedophiles talk about what it is that they do. So, if you can have a chatroom where people discuss that, then it seems to me that such a chatroom can exist whose interest is explosives.
Barnes & Noble.com: Were you afraid delving into this novel knowing you'd be doing so without your good buds Elvis Cole and Joe Pike?
Robert Crais: You know, yes -- a little. After writing eight books set in Elvis Cole's Los Angeles, I know it; I know Elvis Cole, I know Joe Pike, I know those characters. Yet here I'm starting at the beginning. Here's Carol Starkey who's a total stranger. Here's the world that Carol Starkey moves in, and I had to educate myself about that world. And I really wanted to get in deep -- I really wanted to learn it; I wanted her life to feel real, her job to feel textured and true. It was daunting. Every day was a test, every day was a learning experience.
Barnes & Noble.com: Will you ever revisit Carol Starkey's world?
Robert Crais: When I wrote Demolition Angel, I had no intention of doing that; my notion was that this was a one-shot, a stand-alone suspense thriller. But I enjoy Carol Starkey so much, it is certainly possible that I will come back to her again. I've got my next two books already in mind: I'm working on both the next stand-alone and the next Elvis Cole novel. So the soonest there could be another Carol Starkey would have to be three books from now.
Barnes & Noble.com: So, you're continuing to write stand-alone novels. Do you feel rejuvenated by writing new characters, settings, circumstances, etc.?
Robert Crais: Yes. When I finished Demolition Angel I was raring to go on another Elvis Cole novel. There was a sense of rejuvenation. There was a sense of having taken a vacation, gone to another place, and now I'm anxious to get home. The way I expect things to go in the future is to continue to alternate Elvis Cole novels with stand-alone suspense thrillers.
Barnes & Noble.com: Thank you so much for your time.
Robert Crais: Thank you.
