Murder in the O.C.

The 12th novel of T. Jefferson Parker, clearly his most ambitious, covers 50 years in the lives of the surviving Becker brothers of Tustin -- the dogged homicide detective Nick, crime reporter and budding novelist Andy, and David, the man of God. (A fourth sibling, Carl, is a Vietnam casualty.) It meticulously tracks their loss of youth and innocence while observing the changes, none for the better, that have taken place in what was once an easygoing, fruitful conservative paradise.

“Tustin’s different now,” Parker writes in a conversational, nearly verb-free style. “Orange trees long gone. Even out in Bryan and Myford and Irvine not a grove left. Houses packed in tight. Car dealerships and franchised everything, one big shopping opportunity. Doesn’t have a smell anymore, not like oranges anyway.”

The novel begins in the present, with its protagonist, Nick, in his mid-60s, being forced by circumstance to remember a local girl named Janelle Vonn. There is an abrupt flashback to 1954 when, after the Becker boys and the Vonn brothers have punched and kicked one another silly in a rumble, Nick gets his first glimpse of Janelle, wearing a faded blue dress and cowboy boots, with an orange in each hand. To Nick, suffering from a concussion that will affect him for the rest of his life, she looks like the baby sister of California Girl, the raven-haired beauty on the label of the SunBlesst orange crates.

In 1960, a few days after the suicide of her mother, Janelle, her father and sister are invited to share the Beckers’ Thanksgiving dinner. Nick is married and approaching fatherhood. Andy has begun his career at the Tustin Times and is dating a pretty girl from Lemon Heights (“where the rich people lived”). David is attending San Anselmo’s divinity school near San Francisco, and Carl is studying at the Army Language School in Monterey, courtesy of the CIA.

Three years later, Nick is working his way up within the Tustin Police Department, Andy is mulling over an offer to join the Orange County Journal and whether to begin an affair with the daughter of the Journal’s publisher, and David is using a former drive-in theater as his church. Janelle attends one of his Sunday services, drunk and bruised. She tells Nick she has been molested by two of her brothers, and he wastes no time arresting them. The section ends with the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the news that Carl Becker has been killed in Vietnam.

Parker uses these first few chapters not merely to establish a history linking the Becker brothers to the Vonn girl but to present the brothers in full dimension, clearly moving the novel beyond the parameters of the detective story before taking us to 1968 and the brutal murder that is at the book’s core. On an evening in October, Nick, now a homicide detective, and Andy, a reporter for the Journal, arrive at a long-unused SunBlesst packinghouse just outside of town to discover the battered and beheaded corpse of Janelle Vonn.

Her murder is Nick’s first case as lead homicide detective, and it comes with a host of suspects, including a handsome bad-boy dope dealer, a Laguna Beach folk rocker, the associate publisher of Andy’s newspaper and even the Rev. David Becker. The investigation has all the necessary ingredients of the best police procedurals -- the lab reports, interrogations, following of clues, false leads -- but Parker never lets them overpower the more personal events in the Beckers’ lives, some the aftereffects of the murder, some not.

Nor does he let the detective work interfere with his depiction of Orange County at the close of the swinging 1960s, with Commie-hunting John Birchers on the right, sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll beachniks on the left and amusing cameo appearances by era icons Timothy Leary and Charles Manson.

Anyone seeking to while away a few hours of this holiday season with something a bit more substantial than a solidly plotted whodunit need look no further than this cleverly conceived, smartly executed, utterly satisfying novel. *