T. Jefferson Parker is beginning to hit his stride. If
you’ve been reading him from the beginning, you know exactly
what I mean. Parker has been on my author A-list since his debut
work of fiction, LAGUNA HEAT, was published. The time between each
of his books has seemed interminable, though ultimately worth the
wait, and each new title has appeared to take Parker, and his
readers, to a whole new level. His previous novel, L.A. OUTLAWS,
left you with the feeling that everything he had written before was
just an introduction to what he had coming up, the goods that would
really blow your socks off. And you know what? THE RENEGADES lives
up to that promise, and then some.

THE RENEGADES stands on its own just fine but is a nominal
sequel to L.A. OUTLAWS (more on that later). Charlie Hood is back,
now working for the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department,
patrolling the county’s far northern borders and on the
otherwise dusty roads. Hood enjoys the relative quiet and solitude,
which serves as a balm to his own dark and troubled thoughts. All
is abruptly changed, however, when he draws veteran officer Terry
Laws as a riding partner. Before his shift is over, Hood will
witness Laws being gunned down, assassin-style, and will vow to
catch the killer. Hood is temporarily assigned to Internal Affairs
to dig into Laws’s background and determine what motives
there might have been in the murder of an officer who was known in
the department as “Mr. Wonderful.”

Initially, Hood is drawn toward suspecting a local gangbanger
who had a grudge against Laws and who, indeed, bears a resemblance
to the shooter. He casts a wider net, however, and starts eyeing an
arrest that Laws made, years earlier, while partnered with a
reserve deputy named Coleman Draper. As Laws begins to look into
the circumstances behind the arrest, and the personal lives of
Draper and Laws, he slowly comes to the conclusion that time and
the desert conceal both truth and deceit and that no one is as good
or as evil as they might appear to be at first blush.

The last 100 pages of THE RENEGADES should come with a medical
disclaimer. You run serious risk of falling off the edge of your
seat or having a heart attack. But here is where Parker really
takes names: he intersperses the narrative from Hood’s point
of view with an ongoing conversation between Draper and another
party whose identity remains unknown for a good part of the book.
The backstory that forms the foundation for the motivating factors
behind what occurs is accordingly dealt out piecemeal, from two
different places, like breadcrumbs that not only lead the reader
down a particular path but also become nuggets that themselves
become worthy objects of the search.

And while, again, THE RENEGADES is complete in itself, my gut
feeling is that with L.A. OUTLAWS and a future novel, it will form
a trilogy that will stand as the high-water mark of Parker’s
work. In the meantime, a year seems too long a time to wait to find
out.