L.A., the hard way

ROBERT CRAIS kick-starts his new novel with two commando-clad meth heads, high on crystal and paint fumes -- not just any paint, but Krylon Royal Blue Metallic, “a warrior’s color” -- spraying bullets in a bank on L.A.’s Westside. The tweakers have bagged $16 million in 12 earlier bank heists. This time, hyped as well on equal parts power and greed, the huffers break the cardinal rule of bank robbers : Never linger more than two minutes; even if you haven’t gotten the cash, just walk away. This prologue, an operatic dance reminiscent of the film “A Clockwork Orange,” suggests that “The Two Minute Rule” is a made-for-Hollywood shoot’em-up by the author of “Hostage,” “Demolition Angel” and the Elvis Cole mystery novels. But like Crais’ earlier books, it reaches for a lot more.

Wrapped in a panorama of chop shops, factories, dive bars, a San Fernando Valley so sweltering that walking feels like “stepping into soup,” and the padlocked banks of the Los Angeles River, this novel is a tale of one man’s bare-knuckled search for redemption.

That man is Max Holman, who is coming off 10 years in federal lockdown because he too violated the two-minute rule. Holman, we learn, is 46, still young enough to build a straight and sober life. He’s got a few of the 12 steps left to take, including making amends for failing his former girlfriend and their son, Richie, now an LAPD officer. With his few belongings tucked into an Albertson’s bag, he’s ready to leave a halfway house when he learns that Richie has been shot to death along with three other cops. In an instant, a decade’s worth of planning and resolve comes “to a drifting stop, like a ship that had lost its way.... Holman didn’t cry. He wanted to know who did it.” Like the best L.A. noir writers, Crais nudges the mystery genre into higher gear, tackling grand themes in exceedingly personal ways through flawed heroes and hard-to-spot villains. In the 2001 novel “Hostage,” an ex-SWAT negotiator confronts his guilt over failing to save a young hostage. The 2005 movie version offered actor Bruce Willis one of the meatiest roles of his career.

Holman, too, faces unforgiving odds and his own demons. When he learns that Richie and his fellow officers were conspiring to steal the bank robbers’ millions, Holman is driven not only to find the cop killer but also to prove that the boy he’d been too high and wild to help raise wasn’t a “bad seed.”

Crais has admired Raymond Chandler since reading a used copy of “The Little Sister” at 15. And like Chandler, he has devoted himself to depicting the sprawling Southern California metropolis. That gives his intricately plotted novels a backbone in locales you only think you know. In “The Two Minute Rule,” we visit the Hollywood sign, LAPD’s Parker Center headquarters and the 4th Street underpass on the L.A. River. He adds historical background, like the Frogtown gang’s name being derived from its neighborhood’s proximity to the river’s croaking frogs long before the Army Corps of Engineers cemented the channel.

His geography is off in a few spots. For example, Holman’s job in the city of Industry is due east, not south, and a considerable hike from his grungy, Pine-Sol-pungent Culver City kitchenette. Nor is it believable that he could clock out and make it to an LAX-adjacent cemetery and back on today’s traffic-clotted freeways in under two hours. Yet it’s hard to quibble when Crais’ rich imagery has a borrowed Mercury looking like “a turd on wheels” or that Holman tries to choke information from a gang-banger’s wife in a “clapboard box” of a house that smells “of chorizo and cilantro.”

Where Crais excels is in building believable characters to enact his morality plays. He draws them one brushstroke at a time, shading them in with each thought, description and terse phrase. “Why didn’t you run?” Holman’s getaway driver Lil Chee asks about the 10-year-old bust. “Me, I would’a jetted outta that bank straight to Zacatecas.... C’mere. Give a brother some love.” You buy into it when the now mostly legit body-shop owner gives Holman a fake driver’s license (magnetic strip and all), $1,000, a cellphone and a new black Toyota Highlander in which to crisscross the Southland.

No story would be complete without a love interest -- in this case, the FBI agent who took Holman down in the bank job. Now retired, Katherine Pollard, mother of two young boys whose husband keeled over with a fatal heart attack while scuba diving with a younger girlfriend, is going stir-crazy in Simi Valley. She spoke up for Holman at his sentencing but is more than leery when he seeks her help to investigate his son’s death.

Pollard and Holman are two wounded people with hard-as-nails exteriors, both unsure about whom to trust but single-minded, like Dobermans tracking interlopers, each in the way he or she knows best. Their pairing might seem improbable, but in truth, as Crais shows, cop and criminal inhabit a singular universe of good versus evil, opposite sides of the same coin.

Their pursuit of Richie’s killer lands them in the midst of a police investigation within an investigation, targeted by the cops and Pollard’s former FBI boss. Are they good cops or bad? And who will survive?

Crais provides the requisite heart-pounding final scenes. Blinding greed propels the action. All the clue crumbs strewn in our path come into focus. In these moments, the characters reach deep within themselves, revealing their true natures. The symbolism can feel a bit forced at times, but Max Holman (think “Death of a Salesman’s” Willy Loman) has mere minutes to decide how to fill the cavernous hole in his heart and to define the words, “Like father, like son.” *