I actually purchased this book by accident at a used book sale. After I started reading it I couldn't stop. Mr. Parker's writing style let the whole story portray in my mind. I could picture the characters and even smell the salt air. Sometimes I would stop and read an entire paragraph over because it was so beautifully poised. The plot has some twists and turns and about three quarters of the way through I had a hunch on solving the mystery and I had to keep reading to see if I was right, but there was a surprise at the end.
The plot may sound familiar, but surehanded thriller writer Parker (Where Serpents Dance) proves ever-surprising in his latest novel, the story of an unusual pair of police protagonists and a serial killer stalking beautiful women in California's Laguna County. Tim Hess is a retired cop, fighting lung cancer, who's called back to active duty to find the diabolical killer who "signs" his murders by eviscerating his victims.
What novelist T. Jefferson Parker does so well in Where Serpents Lie (and in such previous high-octane outings as Laguna Heat and Pacific Beat) is to bind his characters tightly to the territory in which they live and die--the mostly scorched and urbanized but occasionally still pristine turf of Southern California's Orange County. When he's not running the Crimes Against Youth unit at the Orange County Sheriff's Department, Terry Naughton sits in a cave in Laguna Canyon, drinking tequila, smoking cigars, and trying to understand the twisted mind of a particularly vicious child molester called The Horridus.