LAGUNA HEAT

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.