Suspect

Suspect is the Robert Crais novel that almost no one was expecting and that turned out to be one of the most quietly devastating books in his catalog. The plot is straightforward: Scott James is an LAPD officer recovering from an ambush that killed his partner, and Maggie is a Marine working dog whose handler was killed in Afghanistan and who has come back to the States with a piece of trauma that nobody quite knows what to do with. Scott becomes Maggie's new handler, and the book follows the two of them learning each other while Scott investigates his partner's death.

What makes the book extraordinary is that Crais writes Maggie's perspective. Not anthropomorphized, not cute, but a careful attempt to render a working dog's sensory and emotional world as accurately as a writer can. The Maggie chapters are some of the most moving sections of contemporary American crime fiction. The investigation plot is good. The dog and the man and the slow careful work of trauma recovery, on both sides, is the book.

Five stars. A genuine surprise from a writer who I thought I had taken the measure of. Recommended without reservation, including to readers who do not normally read crime fiction.