Elvis Cole was instrumental in clearing Lionel Bird after he was accused of brutally murdering a young woman. Three years later Bird commits suicide and leaves behind a photo album that indicates that not only did he kill the woman that Cole investigated, he also murdered others before and after that. 
 Oops. 
 Cole reexamines the evidence he gathered and is still convinced that Bird was innocent of that crime. So where did the pictures of the dead women come from? And why is a LAPD task force led by an ambitious deputy chief declaring the cases now closed but still secretly gathering evidence? Is Cole just grasping at straws to avoid admitting that he screwed up and potentially got some innocent women killed? With the help of his trusty partner Joe Pike, Elvis is determined to get answers and refuses to quit even when confronted with pressure from the cops and angry family members of one of the victims. 
 This one comes at a point when Elvis and Joe had spent several of the previous books working cases with intensely personal angles to them with severe consequences. The set-up for this seems like it'd be another in that line with Elvis starting out understandably upset that he might have inadvertently helped a murderer go free to kill again, but that angle sort of fades away in the second half of the book. In fact, it's a little odd how this one starts out with Elvis having so much personally invested, but then it turns into what could be considered an almost routine investigation by Cole and Pike's usual standards. It's almost as if Crais started writing this and decided to scale back how much it'd personally impact Cole by the end of it. 
 There's also some loose ends and things that don't make a lot of sense plot wise. (view spoiler)[Part of what makes Elvis and the reader believe that Deputy Chief Marx is dirty and covering for a murderous politician is the threat that Marx makes against Elvis' cop buddy Lou Poitras. But that threat doesn't make a lot of sense once you know that Marx was actually trying to do the right thing and secretly investigate the politician. We're supposed to buy that Marx is a good guy after all, yet he is willing to ruin the career of another cop because Elvis is asking questions? Marx might be making an empty threat to back Elvis off, but what if Elvis had told Lou and then he kicked up some kind official fuss about it? 
 Elvis and the cops come across as a little simple at the end because they get caught flat-footed when the sister kills Levy, and Cole even says something about having no idea she might do something like that. Really? The woman either killed or set-up one guy she thought killed her sister, and you had no clue she might pull something similar on the guy who actually did it? Hell, I know what she was going to do as soon as Crais described her fake stumble into the tools in the van, and I'm not a cop or a bad ass PI. 
 And for all guilt that Crais tries to heap on Elvis with him taking shit from the cop Crimmens and the Repko family, we don't get much satisfaction in the way of atonement at the end. The final scene with Cole and Marx watching them pull bodies out of Levy's rose garden wasn't a bad way to end it, but it would have been nice to know that Crimmens actually felt guilty for all the crap he'd flung Cole's way. Or that Cole settled up with him as he promised to do for putting the family on his ass in the first place. It would have been nice to get something from the Repko family thanking Cole for finally helping to find the real killer. All of this stuff is a big part of the book, and yet it just seems to drift away with no effort to address any of it. (hide spoiler)] 
 It's typically solid work from Crais, but it almost seems like he started one book and then turned it into another that wouldn't put Cole through such a wringer this time out so it never reaches the kind of highs I've seen from this series at its best.