I'd never read any of the novels of T. Jefferson Parker before California Girl, but based on this one book, I'm a fan for life. I was familiar with Parker's work and his Southern California settings. I'm a sucker for a mystery novel set in a locale I know and love: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego...hell, even Pittsburgh. Books set in San Diego are a little harder to come by, and California Girl is definitely an Orange County book.
It's one of those decade-spanning novels that revolves around two families: the Beckers and the Vonns. The Beckers are a quartet of brothers and when we first meet them, they're fighting with the Vonn boys. As the years pass, both families grow up and grow apart. The Becker boys (Nick, David, Andy and Clay) become, respectively, a reporter, a minister, a cop, and a dead soldier in a far-off country called Viet Nam. The Vonns go on to less honorable professions, and one of them, the beautiful little sister, Janelle, ends up a beauty queen (Miss Tustin, no less) at the age of 18. She also ends up dead in an abandoned warehouse, her head cut off. That event is what the entire book revolves around.
This was--again--totally an impulse buy based on that ethereal cover at left. While no one in the book actually drowns, the ocean is a strong part of Orange County and Southern California, and Janelle is certainly dragged under in a different way. Each of the brothers--with the exception of Clay, who is simply a sacrifice to one of the more horrific events of the times, the 1960s/70s--knows Janelle in a different way. David, the minister, helped got her help when she was having drug problems. Nick and Andy get to know her better after her murder, Nick bringing her alleged killer to justice, Andy reporting it every step of the way. But like the vanishing orange groves in Orange County, the truth vanishes too, behind a facade of rich political figures, hippies, and the changing mores of mid-20th century America.
Parker is excellent with this type of material, carrying the reader back to a bygone--yet stunningly familiar, for those of us who grew up in it--era. He mixes in real personages, such as Dick Nixon and Timothy Leary, and events--JFK's assassination, Viet Nam--indicative of those tumultuous times. It's an exciting and well-crafted book, which keeps you guessing to the very end, 40 years into the future of here and now. I couldn't help but think it would make a spectacular mini-series on HBO, crafted by the right hands into kind of a modern day Ragtime. That's what Parker has given us with California Girl: a decade-spanning history lesson, dramatic and moving in its telling.
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