- Paperback: 464 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins; (Reissue) edition (1 Mar 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0007149360
- ISBN-13: 978-0007149360
- Product Dimensions: 17.2 x 11 x 3.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,444,821 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk
Why isn't T Jefferson Parker as famous as, say, James Patterson or Robert B Parker? He's that good, and in some ways better. In Cold Pursuit, his 11th novel, San Diego homicide cop Tom McMichael finds himself investigating the bludgeoning to death of Pete Braga, a prominent city patriarch who was also a blood enemy of the McMichael family. It's a complex case fraught with political and economic pressures, ugly family history, police corruption and multiple red herrings, made more complex by McMichael's romantic attraction to a key suspect.
Parker's writing is a pleasure from the first sentence to the last: intelligent, often quietly poetic, cliché-free, and as crisp and dry as a good Pinot Gris. Here is the book's opening paragraph, which accomplishes several scene-setting tasks while pleasing both ear and brain:
That night the wind came hard off the Pacific, an El Nino event that would blow three inches of rain onto the roofs of San Diego. It was the first big storm of the season, early January and overdue. Palm fronds lifted with a plastic hiss and slapped against the windows of McMichael's apartment. The digitized chirp of his phone sounded ridiculous against the steady wind outside.
At times the book's richly complex plot gets confusing, and some sections aren't especially suspenseful. However, every page is absorbing and affecting and the ending is a shocker. Peopled by a teeming cast of full-blooded characters and set in a San Diego so vivid you can smell the beach and the blood, Cold Pursuit may be Parker's subtlest, most satisfying tale yet. --Nicholas H Allison, Amazon.com --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
Praise for Jefferson Parker:
'Insanely imaginative' New York Times
‘Parker has only one rival – Thomas Harris’ Washington Post
Praise for Cold Pursuit:
‘I’m always a sucker for a good American police procedural, and Cold Pursuit is a fine example of the genre’ Mail on Sunday
‘An example of how a good police procedural can transcend the questions, answers and hunch-playing. The plot strands fly in all directions, but Jefferson manages to keep order, slowly progressing via a few surprise turnarounds to an unexpected denouement’ Time Out
Praise for Black Water
'Parker at the top of his form' Los Angeles Times
‘Both convincing and heartening. Parker gets better and better’ Literary Review
‘An entertaining story with an appealing heroine’ Sunday Telegraph
‘A well-plotted psychological thriller that keeps the reader guessing’ Time Out
‘A guileful pursuit story with a gripping outcome’ Scotsman
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
At times over-plotted and over-written, this still provides steady entertainment. The occasional explosions of action and plot twists manage to break up the occasional longeurs.
A flawed but nonetheless readable thriller, not Parker's best, but better than most.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A thriller straight out of San Diego, California, that finds its last leg on the Coronado Bridge over Glorietta Bay. Spectacular, dramatic, a real calamity in all directions and dimensions. Once again with that new generation of American detective novels, we are less interested in the particular details of the case, and at times we may overlook the implications of one particular fact to go on a useless loop that any serious police work would have avoided. The book is more interested in the social behaviorism that it tries to expose and reject. The big family of San Diego, that started as fishermen , is the locale of all kinds of criminal activities and acts, inside the family and outside. The author explores some like the organ trafficking across the Mexican boarder performed by cops, customs officers, etc..., behind the back of this big covering family, with or without their agreement but with their knowledge of it. Then it explores the tremendous poverty from which the Irish have tried to escape, but with mixed and limited results over three generations instead of one for their non-Irish counterparts, because of the deep hostility of the formerly presented family clan. Finally the book shows how a girl from a poor "white trash" family in Kentucky will manage to get out of her social fatality, in spite of the relapse of the police who will consider her as suspicious because of these family antecedents, thus proving there is no predestination or irrevocable destiny even for those who come from the scum of the earth. Parker tries to show that we are always the prisoners of habits that are transmitted to us from one generation to the next, not so much by genes as by education, positive and negative, because education can be both positive and negative. For him we are free to get out of this fatality and build our own future. And yet he insists that it is not that easy to achieve. So the crimes become the pretext, or the go-between, for the author to speak of deep social evil facts. We will regret though a few clichés that could have easily been avoided: alcoholic, hot-blooded Irish people for example. Easy to read and easy to figure out, the book is entertaining indeed.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne
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