Pacific Beat by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] the lopping shears moved into his field of vision, opened and shut like the mandibles of a great ant, and moved between his legs.
[He] summoned everything he had. It was a blind surge, a screaming release of fear that brought his torso up level with the floor and guided his hands for the neck of the man with the cutters."

T. Jefferson Parker's third novel Pacific Beat (1991) also happens to be the third book in my TJP Re-read project (it is the sixth novel by the author that I am reviewing here on Goodreads). It follows the weak Little Saigon - a classical case of the literary sophomore curse - and is indeed better than the predecessor, alas still very far from the stellar quality of California Girl or more formulaic yet still excellent Where Serpents Lie or The Fallen.

Jim Weir, an ex-sheriff's deputy, now a treasure hunter, returns home to Newport Beach from Mexico, where he was trying to locate a sunk pirate ship and where he got arrested by Mexican police on made-up drug charges. He lost his boat and got severely beaten, but he is coming back to a much worse disaster. His 39-year-old sister Ann had been killed and her body was found on the beach, brutally violated. Jim's brother is a detective on the Newport Beach police force and Jim is helping in the investigation.

The author masterfully sets up the plot and as the story progresses it does not lose much plausibility, although quite a lot is going on: an escapee from a mental asylum becomes one of the protagonists, and snippets from Ann's diary show she had a secret life that Jim had no idea about. There emerges an issue of ocean chemical pollution; we also read about machinations of city politics. We even have a sarcastic mention of a certain Donald J. Trump in connection with wealth and politics. The torture scene (see the epigraph) is well written so it manages to escape classification as gratuitous violence aimed at titillating the reader.

Mr. Parker's prose, absolutely brilliant at the beginning of the novel, remains in good standing throughout the entire book. As I mention in every review of Mr. Parker's work, his novels wonderfully convey the sense of place of Southern California, in particular of Orange County. However, in my view, the later part of the story that eventually leads to denouement is not very plausible. There is too much of the deus ex machina feeling to the plot twists. While it is not as bad as in Little Saigon it left me with a sense of disappointment.

Still, I recommend the novel for the good prose, solid main part of the plot, and well painted Orange County Pacific coast landscapes.

Three stars.


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