Acts of Vengeance

Rebecca Harris is all the things young men find lovable: bright, benevolent, beautiful both in essence and in substance. Two men, in fact, do love her simultaneously; one is her fiance and the other her secret lover. And then in the space between two heartbeats Rebecca is gone, struck down by an assassin's bullets for being in the wrong place at the right time.

Six months along the road, FBI special agent Joshua Weinstein (the fiance) enlists the aid of John Menden (the lover) in a quasi-legal operation to bring to justice the man responsible for her death. It will not be an easy task, for Vann Holt is the ultraconservative wealthy founder of a high-priced security company -- with a sideline in supplying mercenaries -- who lives in a fortified compound high in the Orange County hills with his surviving family and his company executives. To make matters worse, Holt was trained by some of the best, for he is himself a former FBI agent.

Holt's target on the day Rebecca died was a liberal newspaper columnist who had taken the side of a fifteen-year-old Mexican-American, a boy who killed Holt's son Patrick and left a bullet in his mother's brain. Patrick, the boy said, had raped his aunt and gotten away with it; the newspaperwoman believed him. Patrick's father did not.


Acts of Stealth

Menden's insertion into the Holt compound goes off flawlessly; but life inside the compound reeks of intrigue, with John providing a convenient pawn in power struggles among the Holt executives. He is readily accepted, even adopted by the Holt family, upon whose shoulders the mantle of command rests comfortably. Vann, the father, would take John under his wing as a surrogate to replace his dead son; but the feelings of Valerie (the surviving daughter) are far from familial. In but a matter of days, John finds himself in the uneasy position of preparing to betray what has amounted to an instant family.

On the outside, Joshua is involved in a power struggle of his own with the Bureau brass. He's fighting to keep the operation under his control until he can take Holt down and rid himself of the ghost of Rebecca. We can but watch as John wrestles with his conscience -- the memory of Rebecca juxtaposed against the current reality of Valerie -- as he gathers the evidence that will bring down the killer of one and the father of the other.
And we can also only watch as the tale accelerates madly toward its inevitable conclusion; the moment at which John must choose between his past and his future.


Acts of Character-Building

In this, his fifth novel, T. Jefferson Parker has meshed a compelling plot with vibrant characters. The uneasy collaboration between Joshua and John -- each well aware of the other's role in Rebecca's life -- is fraught with tension. It's a relationship forged in shared anguish, a relationship built of mutual distrust seasoned with a healthy dose of dislike. John is well aware that he is only Joshua's cat's paw; but it is a role he relishes, a role that he gladly accepts.

In his characterizations, Parker presents to the readers a balance often missing from contemporary crime fiction. Reading the novels of a John Grisham, a Sue Grafton, a David Baldacci; we see the world in terms of stark blacks and whites. The villain is painted as the embodiment of evil; his every waking moment consumed with plans for his next nefarious deed. Were such characters depicted in the heavy ink and pure colors of comic books, they might bear names like "The Joker," "Pruneface," "Lex Luthor"... The hero/ine is, of course, the villain's polar opposite, a study in shades of white: the navajo white of moral character, the ecru of devotion to duty, the eggshell of a jazz-lover or a jogger, the winter white of courage.

The inhabitants of The Triggerman's Dance differ, however, for each is a study in a melange of color. The most vivid of all is the villain of the piece: Vann Holt, he who meant to kill a journalist for sullying the name of his son and instead killed an innocent woman. On his home turf, Holt is a man of generosity, of fierce love and loyalty to his damaged wife and his surviving daughter. He is proud, cultured in his own way, a man of depths unplumbed, of facets whose sudden appearance are equally likely to engender delight or dread. Vann Holt is painted from the stuff of reality: he could be your neighbor, your father-in-law, your boss. From such a man, we can learn new lessons, new insights not just into his mind but into our own psyches.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson is a truth that John Menden learns from his few weeks with Vann Holt: evil though a man's deeds may seem, we must understand his motives to comprehend his deeds.


Acts of Writing

Starting with Laguna Heat, I've read all of Parker's previous work -- a quintet of novels set on Parker's home turf in and around Orange County, California. Parker brings to his work a spare style, always delivering strong, complex characters in a tightly-crafted plot. The Triggerman's Dance is formed in the same mold as his other novels. There are no recurring characters; no recurring villains. There are only ordinary people called upon for a few brief days or weeks to live extraordinary lives.

While Parker's greatest strength in in the care he gives to the construction of characters, this is not to say that he gives short shrift to the other aspects of his craft, including the setting of a scene. Here, Parker describes a sunset at Liberty Ridge, the Holt compound:

John moved to the edge of the canopy away from the house and watched the flat-bottomed crescent of a sun evaporate into the ocean. As always he waited for the flash of green; as always it failed to show. He walked out onto the lawn. To the north he could see the Valencia groves shimmering in the wind and the fading light. The western hillsides were an autumn yellow with patches of green in the tight, shaded folds. The lake was buffed to a dull silver patina by the wind and the big Norfolk Island pine on the beach swayed with each gust. John imagined the wind whistling through Rebecca's bones, and then he unimagined it.


Overall

The Triggerman's Dance is a finely crafted piece of work, especially in the detail of its characters. As we watch John's interactions with the man who killed his beloved -- accidental or no -- Parker draws us deeper and deeper into a comparison of the two men. Both men capable of love, of pride, of craftsmanship, of violence. Both men of deeply-held convitions. Two men who, except for a single act, might be interchangeable -- two men forever separated by that act.



Recommended: Yes