The Triggerman's Dance by T. Jefferson Parker
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"The only living things proximate to the event that remained truly unrippled were the eucalyptus tree and the poppies in the planter near where Rebecca, heart-shot and staggering, then heart-shot again, fell and died in the pouring rain."

A disappointment from one of my favorite crime authors: T. Jefferson Parker's thriller The Triggerman's Dance (1996) fails to deliver on the promise of its first chapters. The well-written beginning of the novel will captivate the reader. Alas, roughly after 100 pages, my interest in the plot began to weaken, to completely disappear towards the end of the book.

A brief synopsis of the setup: Costa Mesa, Orange County, California. Rebecca Harris, a young intern in the Orange County Journal, has been shot to death. It soon becomes clear that the bullets were meant for Ms. Baum, the newspaper columnist, for whom Ms. Harris worked. The initial investigation establishes that Ms. Baum's planned assassination would be considered a hate crime, because of her being a woman, Jewish, and promulgating left-wing views. Joshua Weinstein, an FBI agent, who also happened to be Ms. Harris' fiancé, is handling the investigation. The suspect is one Vann Holt, a very rich land- and business-owner, known for his right-wing views, extreme even for generally conservative Orange County. In yet another major twist in the setup, Mr. Weinstein recruits John Menden, a journalist, and Ms. Harris' lover, to help with the investigation.

I would have no problem with the contrived concept of the fiancé and the lover pooling their resources to find the killer of the woman they both adored if only it served some purpose in the novel. The unusual setup provides no literary payoff, though; the relationship dynamics between the two men are not shown with much psychological depth.

Yet the greatest disappointment for me is Mr. Parker's writing in The Triggerman's Dance. I like many of his novels for their economical, dispassionate, yet vivid prose, whereas at one point in this book the author even stoops to pretentious, capital-letter style:

"He craved Clarity and disliked the anger of the Red Zone.[...] But Clarity brought steadfastness to his vision and his limbs. Clarity allowed his eyes to see and his mind to work. You could ride Clarity, like a good machine, through thickets of confusion and rage."

Or my least favorite phrase from the novel:

"They run. They shoot. They run. They fight."

which is repeated several times, with different pronouns. This stylistic device reminds me of the adolescent male prose of Mr. Palahniuk's Fight Club.

Finally, why do we need 540 pages? Trimmed down to 300 - 350 pages, and cleaned of histrionics, it could be a great thriller, like many other novels by Mr. Parker are.

Two-and-a-half stars.


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