His marriage ends, he resigns from SWAT, and he struggles to escape from his former life by taking the chief-of-police job in a sleepy, affluent bedroom community far from the chaos and crime of Los Angeles.īut Talley's pursuit of peaceful small-town life is about to change when three young men, fleeing the robbery of a mini-mart, invade a tightly secured home and take the family hostage.

After a despondent father murders his wife and son and takes his own life, Talley hits bottom. But the high stress, unforgiving job took an irreparable toll on his psyche. Hostage is a blistering stand-alone thriller with superb characters in crisis, multistranded plotting, and pitch-perfect Southern California sensibility.Jeff Talley was a good husband, a fine father, and a frontline negotiator with LAPD's SWAT unit. 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. 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. 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. Plunged back into the high-pressure world that he desperately wants to forget, Talley soon learns that his nightmare has only begun. Enter Chief of Police Jeff Talley, a stressed-out former LAPD SWAT negotiator who is hiding from his past. 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. It’s an unstoppable read.Īn ex-con with delusions of grandeur and his tagalong brother unwittingly team up with a psychopath one wrong word away from meltdown.

Hostage proves his earlier success was no fluke.

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

Hostage by Robert Crais