fine, nothing special ( )

A real whodunnitt of a novel. The period was the 60's in Laguna area. Solving a murder riddle is the main subject of the story. ( )

The four Becker boys, Clay, David, Nick and Andy, often found themselves at odds with the Vonn boys and during one particularly violent teenaged rumble the two little Vonn sisters, Janelle and Lynette, joined the fight by throwing rocks at the Beckers. The Vonn family, desperately poor and no stranger to crime, stayed at odds with the Beckers for many years. Now in 1963 the boys are grown: David is a minister, Nick a homicide detective for Orange County, Andy is a newspaper reporter and Clay has been killed in Vietnam. The three remaining Beckers are drawn into the gruesome murder of 19-year-old Janelle Vonn whose decapitated body has been found at the old OrangeBlest packing plant warehouse. Janelle had grown into a beautiful young woman and although many in the community, including pastor David, reached out to her to keep her on the right path, Janelle fell into the rising drug culture. Nick, the lead on his very first homicide case, takes her murder personally and vows to bring the killer to justice but the suspects are numerous including drug pushers, underground musicians and even some local political figures. Thirty-six years after Janelle's murder Nick and Andy, now in their 60's, stumble upon new evidence that completely changes the decades-old case.

This is the first book I have read by T. Jefferson Parker and I do believe I have found another author that I truly enjoy. The plot was well developed and I cared about all of the Becker boys. The reader knows at the outset that the older Andy and Nick have found the new evidence and that makes for a particularly good mystery trying to figure out who almost got away with murder. I will definitely read more from T. Jefferson Parker.
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Like Parker’s earlier Edgar winner,Silent Joe, California Girl is set in Orange County and brought home even more than the earlier book that Orange County is not Los Angeles.
There are a lot of ways one could describe California Girl. It’s a story about two families, the Beckers and the Vonns, and how they intersect and affect each other’s lives. It’s definitely a story of the changes in America, and specifically Orange County, from the 50s through the 60s and onward. Richard Nixon and Charles Manson make brief appearances, as does Timothy Leary. It’s also the story of three brothers – a clergyman, a journalist, and a cop – trying to love and support each other and be honest men in spite of their own human frailties and the compromises they sometimes have to make.
I have a hard time reading Parker’s books. They evoke corruption so well I almost have to hold my nose – even this book, which was not really about corruption, has a character who makes a fortune from a cleaner made of rotten oranges. Parker’s world is not a world I want to visit often. Although his characters enjoy the beauty and good weather of Southern California, they are also surrounded by urban sprawl and commercial ugliness (not to mention some extremely right-wing characters and others who are just generally unpleasant.) In some ways Parker’s books remind me of Donna Leon’s Guido Brunetti novels. But although Brunetti goes on beating his head against the wall of bureaucracy and corruption that confronts him at the end of nearly every book, he has the many compensations of Venice to console him. Parker’s Orange County doesn’t seem like a good place to live, but it’s a place we need to know about, and the stories he tells about it are worth hearing. So even though in many ways I didn’t “like” this book, I would highly recommend it. ( )

A great story of a family who interact with a girls murder in the 1960's in Orange county California. Fiction but very historical. ( )