Cold Pursuit by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"That night the wind came hard off the Pacific, an El Niño event that would blow three inches of rain onto the roofs of San Diego. It was the first big storm of the season, early January and overdue. Palm fronds lifted with a plastic hiss [...]"

It's a cheap trick to use the first sentence of a novel for the epigraph, but it so happens that when I am writing this in late January the first storm of the season is blowing over half of inch of rain onto the roofs of my home town, San Diego. The novel begins when homicide detective Tommy McMichael has just received a phone call from his lieutenant that Pete Braga has been bludgeoned to death in his estate on the bay side of Point Loma. Mr. Braga had been a longtime fixture on the San Diego scene: a tuna fleet captain in the 1970s, then a Mercury dealer, then the mayor, the port commissioner, and one of the most famous San Diego city boosters. There happens to be a lot of dramatic history between the victim and Det. McMichael's family. In 1952, Mr. Braga had shot McMichael's grandfather, ostensibly in self-defense; he was not charged with the killing.

Cold Pursuit (2003) is yet another novel by T. Jefferson Parker, that brings the works of Ross Macdonald, the quintessential California mystery writer, to the reader's mind. As in Macdonald's novels, the plot is composed of entangled threads of past and present; the main difference seems to be that Mr. Parker tends to be more explicit about the connections. In both authors' works the past and the present threads of the plot usually display an elegant symmetry.

The victim's young and attractive nurse is the first suspect and the author offers the reader quite a subtle beginning of a romantic thread in the novel. Alas, a love scene later in the plot is written at the level much below the author's usual mastery of prose. On the other hand, I love the beginning of the ninth chapter:

"'Psittacidae,' said Dr. Robert Eilerts, chief ornithologist for the San Diego ZOO."

As usual in Mr. Parker's novels the complex plot abounds with political and business connections. To me, this is the main strength of this novel and most other works by the author. Mr. Parker, an ex-journalist, is very good at understanding and depicting the mechanisms of city and business politics. Accounts of the Port Commission's personnel politics, exposition of various issues related to planning the new airport and cargo terminal for San Diego and construction of an inland railroad through Imperial Valley provide fascinating reading. The presentation is so plausible that I had the feeling I was reading the metro and business pages of the San Diego Union Tribune, the main local paper.

Unfortunately, as it very often happens with mystery/crime novels, even the ones written by a very good author like Mr. Parker, the ending is the weakest part. While the Tijuana bit is well written and interesting, we also have a cliché shootout and a cliché chase. One of the local sightseeing attractions is featured towards the end of the plot. No four-star rating even if this is a very good novel, well written, absorbing, and hugely realistic except for a few bits.

Three-and-a-half stars.


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