Parker’s ‘Storm’ merely thunders

A Southern California native, T. Jefferson Parker grew up in Tustin in the 1960s and ‘70s, graduated from UC Irvine, worked as a reporter at the Newport Ensign and the Daily Pilot and, in 1985, became a bestselling crime writer with his first novel, “Laguna Heat.” Thirteen more have followed, all set in or around San Diego and Orange County and all dripping with a compelling-enough hybrid of tough-guy noir-speak and Santa Ana wind metaphors to make him one of Southern California’s preeminent living authors of crime fiction.

Nearly every sentence Parker writes pays homage not only to the traditions of the genre -- there’s a staccato cadence to his syntax that suggests the story is unfolding too quickly to bother with certain pronouns -- but also to the heat-baked flora of his stamping grounds. His heroes are sun-parched and embattled and his crimes rooted in well-researched local legacies. Spanish words pepper the text as generously as the descriptions of bougainvillea and orange groves that find their way onto so many pages.

But an understanding of place is not always commensurate with an understanding of people, and Parker’s latest novel, “Storm Runners,” dishes up characters who are so dwarfed by the drama of their surroundings that you almost wish those orange groves would pipe in with a few words of their own. At the center of the story is 38-year-old Matt Stromsoe. He’s a sheriff turned PI whose relentless pursuit of an old high school buddy -- a Harvard scholarship kid turned gang kingpin named Mike Tavarez -- leads to an explosion that is intended for Stromsoe but kills his wife and young son instead.

Disfigured and emotionally damaged, Stromsoe boozes it up for a few years in Florida before being summoned back to California for a special assignment. It seems that Frances “Frankie” Hatfield, a popular weather reporter on Fox News’ San Diego affiliate, is being stalked. And despite a glass eye, seven pins in his leg and a missing finger on his left hand, Stromsoe is to be her bodyguard.

But this stalker is not your average predator, and Frankie, it turns out, is not your average Fox weather reporter. Tall, sassy and given to hobbies like collecting river water from every continent on Earth, she can shoot a gun, drive her Mustang like a drag racer and, when not signing autographs after her live broadcasts from the field, just happens to be developing a top-secret formula for making rain. Spurred by the legacy of her great-great-grandfather, who’d been run out of drought-stricken San Diego in 1916 after his mysterious rain-making formula led to the city’s flooding, Frankie is on the verge of perfecting the recipe. The only problem is the Department of Water and Power wants her stopped.

This being the kind of taut, well-oiled thriller for which Parker is famous, all dusty roads naturally lead back to Tavarez and the colossally powerful Mexican Mafia (La Eme, as its called throughout the novel) that he now controls. Locked up in prison for the deaths of Stromsoe’s wife and son, he’s got guards on his payroll and prostitutes visiting outside the fence and is running La Eme through coded instructions over e-mail. He also has connections to the DWP and a beef with Stromsoe that goes beyond the usual cop versus criminal business. Stromsoe’s now-dead wife was Tavarez’s former girlfriend, and Tavarez’s true love, a 17-year-old “nearly full-blooded Aztec” whose dialect factors into the impenetrable gang code, was killed in a shootout orchestrated by Stromsoe. Hardened to near madness by prison and obsessed with revenge, Tavarez (a.k.a. El Jefe, “the boss”) sets his murderous sights on Frankie, for whom he assumes his rival has fallen and whose death, for Stromsoe, would be a fate worse than his own.

That assumption is, of course, correct. It also feeds into much of what doesn’t work about “Storm Runners,” because the implausibility of Frankie Hatfield’s character is so distracting that we can’t quite buy anything she says or does. Though her age is never given, we’re told she looks to be “in her midtwenties.” She owns a gated home, 100 acres of investment property and, in what should raise the eyebrows of real-life local TV reporters, earns roughly $1,000 a day.

But in “Storm Runners,” hyperbole isn’t just a literary device, it’s the novel’s semantic core. Female characters are too often either gorgeous, pregnant or sick with cancer; plot points are frequently recapped to aid forgetful readers; and no car ignition is merely turned off when the phrase “kill the engine” can be used again and again to convey the leathery idiom of which Parker is so enamored. Along the way, we’re treated to dialogue like “I think the world of you, you big lug” and track-stopping doozies like this: “She held her robe up snug at the chin but she felt the Northern California cold come instantly through her socks and into her feet then up her legs and into her feminine parts, where the remains of the tumor lay hopefully dead forever.”

In fairness, Parker’s fans -- and there are many -- aren’t in this game for the graceful prose. Like most thrillers, his books are largely a race to the finish, and “Storm Runners,” with its brisk pace and stealthy plot twists, is no exception. Tavarez, though a bit too transparent to pass as a world-class criminal, is sufficiently psychopathic to surprise us once in a while, and Stromsoe is gruffly appealing, if only because it’s hard to root against a guy with a missing finger and eye. But unlike some of Parker’s earlier works, namely 2004’s “California Girl,” which was broad in scope and framed its plot around issues of class, politics and geography, “Storm Runners” isn’t structurally or intellectually sophisticated enough to compensate for its clumsiness.

For all of its weather-making, it leaves us thirsty for the smarter, more rigorous storytelling of which Parker is capable.

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Meghan Daum is a columnist on The Times’ op-ed page.