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.
When a woman is mistakenly assassinated by a sniper from a white supremacist militia, her death brings together her FBI agent fiancee and her journalist lover, John Menden. The two team up to exact revenge by destroying the militia group, known as the Freedom Ring, with Menden infiltrating the group's Liberty Ridge compound. When he falls in love with the commander's daughter the plot becomes tautly complicated. In a scenario grounded in events on the right-wing fringes of U.S. society, Parker engineers a grandly violent climax to assuage all Menden's macho hatred.
Parker’s superb new thriller continues the tale of Charlie Hood, the Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy who fell hard for beautiful gangster Allison Murrieta in L.A. Outlaws (2008). Deputy Hood now patrols the Antelope Valley, a desert region north of Los Angeles where still nights and stark beauty provide a refuge from his past (though he still hasn’t come to terms with Murrieta’s death). But Hood’s new beat has a breed of heinous criminals all its own.
At the dramatic start of Parker's excellent 13th novel (after 2004's California Girl), San Diego homicide detective Robbie Brownlaw suffers a head trauma that causes his senses to get mixed up. The sounds of conversations, for example, are accompanied by colored shapes that reflect the speakers' emotions.
When reporter/crime writer Russell Monroe finds his former lover brutally slain in an apparently ritual style, he suspects a connection to other recent murders in the county. Somehow, the case never appears on the police blotter - although Russell saw his former colleague, homicide chief Marty Parish, leaving the scene of the crime - and soon all evidence of the death disappears. Meanwhile, a string of killings continues in the same gruesome style, and Russell becomes the contact of the deranged man responsible.
