California Girl by
T.Jefferson Parker
pbk out June 05
(HarperCollins)
at £6.99
An American murder mystery stretching over thirty-six years. The four Becker brothers include a cop, a reporter and a priest and the complex story follows them from the 'fifties, when they are involved in a kid’s gang fight with the scruffy Vonn family. Some years later, one of the Vonn girls, who became a local beauty queen, is found decapitated in an old orange packing plant and Nick Becker, the homicide detective, gets it as his first case. Andy, the journalist, is right in there alongside him and even David, the priest is involved. There latter has started a successful ‘drive-in’ church in a derelict open air cinema. The families of all the brothers are intimately mixed up in all that goes on, which includes dirty politics, as it is the time of Nixon’s rise to power from that part of the country. The cop gets an arrest and a conviction, but decades later finds that he was wrong.
Jefferson Parker is a widely acclaimed author and is undoubtedly a writer of great talent. However, I personally did not enjoy the book, perhaps partly from a surfeit of American mysteries, which whatever the story-line, seem to me to have a certain similarity which does not travel well across the Atlantic. My mother used to say that sometimes ‘she couldn’t get into a book’ and this is how I felt about this one. Even after the first ten thousand words, the characters - of which there were too many - failed to interest me and I found I didn’t really care what happened to them or the story. Probably my fault, not the author’s, but it was an effort to stick it out to the last page.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
California Girl by
T.Jefferson Parker
