Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Spenser and Hawk. There are some pretty amazing duos in crime fiction. I’d put Elvis Cole and Joe Pike right up there with the best of them.

Cole and Pike, the creations of crime novel author Robert Crais, return in “Taken,” Crais’ latest book about the cool Los Angeles detective and wiseguy Cole and his man-of-few-words-but-lots-of-deadly-action partner Pike.

Crais has played change-up a bit in recent books, sometimes concentrating more on Pike and less on Cole. In “Taken,” the author splits the story pretty evenly between Cole and Pike with a little attention paid to Jon Stone, Pike’s equally deadly but much more flamboyant associate.

As usual, Cole is a practical but noble example of the classic “knight for hire” crime novel character. Here he’s hired by a LA businesswoman to find her college-age daughter. Cole quickly determines that the daughter and her boyfriend have been taken by ruthless criminals who prey on human traffickers and the undocumented immigrants they smuggle into the country.

The twist in the story is that Cole himself gets taken by the bad guys and it’s up to Pike and Stone to get him back.

Crais, like Robert B. Parker did with his Spencer books, makes his protagonists immensely likable. Although Pike is quiet and mysterious, Cole is a flippant hero, needling the bad guys in his efforts to push them into mistakes.

It’s hard to imagine that Crais has been writing about Cole and Pike since 1987. He’s written 15 books about the two as well as some stand-alone novels that have fed into his series.

While the last few books haven’t had the punch of the first several, Crais has deepened our understanding of Cole and Pike — particularly Pike — and fleshed out their personalities. While the books might not carry the emotional weight of the early entries in the series — especially now that Cole’s relationship with attorney Lucy Chenier seems to be on the back burner — they’re still absorbing, entertaining reads and time spent with familiar characters.