- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Arrow Books Ltd; New edition edition (19 Nov 1987)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099492105
- ISBN-13: 978-0099492108
- Product Dimensions: 17.6 x 11 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,232,086 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Review
Knockout debut by a Southern California cloth-of-Chandler thriller writer who keeps his metaphors tingling amid smart dialogue and whose style already has the ripe, heady grip of a salted margarita. Tom Shepard, 32, is the new homicide detective in Orange County's wealthy, tennis- and boat-loving Laguna Beach, whose 100,000 population graphs a .5 annual murder rate - or one body every two years. Not much work for the hometown returnee - until the Fire Killer appears, a murderer who announces his coming with gift Bibles to his victims, each book's title page red-lettered with an aphorism such as LIARS BURN AND LITTLE LIARS BURN FIRST, and who then pours turpentine over their bodies and ignites them. Newly divorced by his upward-mobile actressy wife, Shepard is impotent and drinking far, far too much following his being hounded out of the Los Angeles Police Department by the press for having killed a 16-year-old black teenager who had just stabbed Shepard's partner. Complicating his return to Laguna is the fact that his father, now a TV preacher with a drive-in movie church, is that town's former police chief. When Tom was only four months old, his father Wade found his tennis friend Azul Mercante raping Tom's mother, and in a fight over Wade's pistol she was killed and Mercante later given a long jail term. Or was she being raped? Now, when a heavy-drinking old stable-owner and gambler is found with his head bashed in, a thousand dollars in bills stuffed down his throat and his outer body burned black, Shepard approaches the victim's chilly daughter Jane for help. Once he overcomes her archness, he begins uncovering motiveless malignancies that seem to lead him directly into his own past, his father's earlier alcoholism and born-again recovery and that tie to a fabulous beach club. . . While the story is grippingly plotted and has an aura of ancestral horror, its real hook comes from brilliantly original dialogue and Shepard's reactions to the varied violence he meets: he bleeds, gets concussions, is repelled and made watery-kneed by both the dead and the living and is always intensely present on the page. He's not at all sure he's cut out for this work. Not the least of the story's merits is its utter familiarity with police work and the absorbing logic of detection. Then there are the pungently defined, sometimes movingly human characters (especially his father, a solid-gold Christian in a Sophoclean darkness), the mid-August heat and glittery scene-painting of chic Laguna Beach under turquoise California skies. Writerly and memorable. (Kirkus Reviews)
Product Description
Laguna...
Where every day the sun makes a promise the nighttime breaks, while the super-rich live out expensive fantasies in posh beach houses and drown their memories in Cuervo Gold margaritas...
Laguna...
Where trouble has swept in like a Santa Ana wind, blowing the cover off a world of torture, murder and blood-red secrets
Laguna...
Where a crazed killer has turned paradise into a Disneyland of depraved violance--with a fiery vengeance--and where homicide cop Tom Shephard unravels a grisly mystery that reaches back across forty years of sordid sex, blackmail, and suicide into the dark corners of his own past, and sweats out a deadly truth in the sweltering..
Laguna Heat
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Where every day the sun makes a promise the nighttime breaks, while the super-rich live out expensive fantasies in posh beach houses and drown their memories in Cuervo Gold margaritas...
Laguna...
Where trouble has swept in like a Santa Ana wind, blowing the cover off a world of torture, murder and blood-red secrets
Laguna...
Where a crazed killer has turned paradise into a Disneyland of depraved violance--with a fiery vengeance--and where homicide cop Tom Shephard unravels a grisly mystery that reaches back across forty years of sordid sex, blackmail, and suicide into the dark corners of his own past, and sweats out a deadly truth in the sweltering..
Laguna Heat
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
Format:Mass Market Paperback
As any good cop will tell u, love, money, blackmail and revenge are the main reasons why people get killed, not necessarily in that order. This novel has a cocktail of all these ingredients mixed together that make up the foundation of the story. It is about 2 seemingly random brutal murders that new detective in town Tom Shephard has to solve. There is nothing in this novel that wasnt written loads of times befoe and after; i mean who hasnt read about a divorced, alcoholic, tough cop with a dark past and one quick to use his hands. And along the way comes the beautiful damsell in distress that quickly finds a way into our detective s heart....and bed. Apart from these not so original points the plot is a good one though takes a bit to start really kicking in. The finale is not entirely unpredictable but apt. Not the best thriller i ve read but this was the author s debut novel so it shouldnt and wasnt judged too harshly.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
15 reviews
39 of 41 people found the following review helpful
Superior detective story
24 Mar 2000
Format:Mass Market Paperback
It pains me to see only 1 other review in this space. I'm fairly new to T. Jefferson Parker, but to my mind he's better than John Sandford, Jonathan Kellerman, and James Patterson, much better than Robin Cook and Patricia Cornwell, and nearly the equal of Michael Connelly. Obviously he needs some better representation. Laguna Heat is a well plotted mystery with plausible twists and ironies. The characters, especially Tom Shepard, are authentic and finely nuanced, full of human frailties and intriguing historical baggage that unfolds along with the murder investigation. This book never overwhelmed me with its power, but consistently impressed me with its competence. Not a sentence rang false. I will eagerly seek out other Parker titles, and recommend this to any fans of the mystery/detective genre.
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful
What a Terrific Debut Novel--Loved it!
10 July 2000
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Having read all T. Jefferson Parker's current novels and loving them, I decided to check out his earlier stuff. Laguna Heat arrived and I started it late one afternoon. Immediately, I was drawn into the storyline; but, even more importantly, I was drawn into the mind and character of Tom Shephard. What a well-developed character Parker has given us here. So much is going on in the life of the former-LA cop...trying to live with a righteous shooting from his early-cop days and coping with a new position and murder spree in his hometown, quiet Laguna Beach. And all his father's old friends are involved someway. Too, he is dealing with the heartbreak of divorce, hanging on for dear life. This was just a great read and one I'm so glad I found. I'm only sorry that some of the other early Parkers are out of print and I can't get them. T. Jefferson Parker has become one of my favorite mystery writers and I look forward to starting his latest, Red Light.
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
A classic "Who done it?"
27 Aug 1999
Format:Mass Market Paperback
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 only flaw that I saw was from a legal standpoint. In real life it would not have ended this way because of the way our justice system works. I won't give it away but it has to do with correct police interrogation procedure. Of course I'm probably just being picky because of having a law background. After I finished this book I went out and purchased "Little Saigon" and "Pacific Beat". I think that this book would make a heck of a good movie. Keep on pumping out the books Mr. Parker and I'll keep reading them.
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