Listened to: "The Two Minute Rule" by Robert Crais

Listened to: The Two Minute Rule by Robert Crais, 2006, downloaded from overdrive.com.

Pretty decent novel; however, the narrator was not very good.

Richard Hollman is recently paroled from Federal prison after serving time for bank robbery. On the last day of Hollman's time at the halfway house he is notified that his long estranged police officer son, Richie, was murdered the night before. Hollman had been waiting until his final release to try and contact Richie.

For years Hollman was a car thieve and drug addict whose contact with his son was sporadic - at best - and spent no time with Richie as his parent. One time Richard took Richie on an outing to the Santa Monica pier and left the eight-year old boy with his friend's girlfriend so Hollman and his pal could go steal a Corvette they spotted in the parking lot.

Hollman is well drawn out by Crais and he has quite a temper. Hollman is constantly struggling to keep himself together over the death of his kid and his guilt at being such a piece of crap father and that maybe Richie turned out bad like Hollman. He starts asking questions about what happened the night Richie and three other officers were all murdered in the LA River channel. Hollman's questions get him in trouble with a Police Lieutenant in charge of the case.

The story is mostly believable and has a nice tie-in to a fictional version of the armed robbers from the 1997 North Hollywood bank shoot-out. Hollman, with the help of a former FBI agent who was bored and frustrated at home until Hollman sent a letter asking for help, figures out that the cops Richie was involved with were searching for the missing $16 million bucks from the robbers multiple bank robberies.

A good novel with a no-so-good narrator. The narrator's voices were annoying and almost all the time he had Hollman on edge and loud mouthed; that was grating to me.