The irony abounds (a book review)

It was not until I left San Diego that I discovered a novelist who sets his detective fiction there, and I'm happy to report that T. Jefferson Parker is a writer at the top of his craft. I read Cold Pursuit and liked it very much. Apart from being a first-rate police procedural, it's also a novel of rare psychological depth.

When Detective Thomas McMichael and his partner Hector Diaz solve not just one but at least three serious crimes, they do so in believable ways, with believable, albeit ambitiously rendered, complications. Neither cop is a moral exemplar, but both are good men who live by a code of honor. Pat Conroy, who packs his own novels (The Lords of Discipline, The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini) with Southern-style dysfunction, would tip his hat to the feud between the Irish and the Portuguese that pushes Cold Pursuit along like a surfboard in the Tijuana Slough.

Parker's prose is workmanlike rather than sparkling, but he has an eye for detail and an ear for dialogue. The story is not, repeat not, suspenseful enough to be called a thriller, because Parker is focused more on character than on danger. Still, there are shades of Raymond Chandler here, and shades of Shakespeare, too. There is even a whiff of John Steinbeck's East of Eden, without that book's epic scope.

The rich old man whose murder kicks things off is fully-realized because he has to be for the novel to have any staying power, but even the bit players are given their moments in the sun, as when we learn that the medical examiner wears a "lucky" clip-on tie that he changes once a year, and that a glib young Port Commissioner has a grisly way of keeping coyotes off his expensive property.

Parker makes great use of San Diego and its environs in telling his story, which unfolds over two surprisingly rainy weeks in January of 2003. I can vouch for the accuracy of most of his descriptions. Parker gets Spreckels Pavilion, Imperial Beach, and the Coronado Bridge exactly right. Ditto his description of the cramped approach to Lindbergh Field, the Catholic church in Poway named for Saint Gabriel, and the giant boulders in the mountain range to the east of San Diego proper.

There are places in the book to which I haven't been, but would recognize anyway. The tobacco shop run by Detective McMichael's sister seems a thinly-disguised version of Liberty Tobacco, for example. I'm guessing that Parker simply translated the name of the real establishment into Spanish, moved it to a trendier part of town, and gave it a female owner-- all stock in trade for members of the novelists' guild.

A plot device having to do with rare parrots feels like filler, but Parker's depiction of Port Authority politics is "spot on," as my friend Kurt likes to say. Only once did I find myself saying, "that was sloppy," and then it was over a minor detail, when McMichael is tracing the whereabouts of a vehicle described as a "wine-colored SUV." Everybody from the car dealer to McMichael himself assumes that "wine-colored" is synonymous with "rich red," and, of course, it is, but how come white wine gets no respect?

I once spent a few delicious minutes test-driving a "champagne-colored" Mercedes Benz SUV on a crisp sunny day around a mini-mall parking lot only blocks from the ocean in La Jolla, but I wouldn't expect "champagne" to have cornered the market for describing luxury car exteriors on the lighter side.

That said, I like this novel better than anything by Los Angeles-based Michael Connelly (no slouch himself), and would rank T. Jefferson Parker ahead of the better-known Robert B. Parker, and right up there with Loren Estleman, when it comes to their respective writing chops. I haven't enjoyed a cop story this much since reading some of the early work by Robert Crais.

POSTSCRIPT: If you're in the mood for another book review, Otto Penzler's panning of a new novel by David Ignatius is quite entertaining:

The blonde, Alice Melville, has a heart of gold, but then so does a hard-boiled egg. She apparently has dedicated her life to helping poor Arabs, never losing an opportunity to lecture Ferris on the arrogance and beastliness of Americans. She lives in a slum, but speaks of what "really good guys" the local Al Qaeda sympathizers are.

Then, with enough hot air to float all the balloons in the Macy's parade, she delivers another lecture: "Do you listen to them, Roger? Does the American government listen to them? Or do we just want to shoot them?"