Robert Crais's A Dangerous Man

The driver's window exploded as if they'd been broadsided by a runaway truck.  His door flew open and the driver vanished.  Something blocked the light and the man on top of her jerked away.  He convulsed and flew over the seat and out the door as if he had been sucked into space.
--Robert Crais, A Dangerous Man (Putnam, 2019).

I must say that I prefer Crais's first few novels (starting with The Monkey's Raincoat in 1987) to his more recent ones.  The earlier books focused on private eye Elvis Cole and had an element of moral ambiguity.  Since Crais added the character of Joe Pike, a mercenary and explosives expert, it's been pretty much good guys and bad guys, as Pike and Cole have teamed up to rescue damsels in distress and the novels have become something resembling medieval romances of non-stop dialogue. My wife Susan reads "cozy" mysteries and refers to them as "potato chips," something too many hard-boiled  detective novels have become, albeit spicier, for an audience seemingly bored by ratiocination.

Having said this, I do think Crais does this kind of book well and he uses the Los Angeles landscape of the 21st century almost as effectively as Raymond Chandler used it in the 20th century. Cole, Pike and damsel Isabel are well drawn and detailed, as is forensic scientist John Chen, while the thugs who are trying to recover stolen drug money are as tedious and uninteresting as such evil characters often are.