As he did in Laguna Heat, T. Jefferson Parker once again combines his atmospheric style and unforgettable images of California to create a spellbinding mystery that continually anticipates your very thoughts, a novel in which each new revelation comes to you with the force and intimacy of a returning memory. Pacific Beat begins on a May night in Newport Beach’s Back Bay, when the discovery of a brutally murdered woman with roses bound to her body sets off the kind of manhunt the police and their families dread. The victim, Ann Weir Cruz, is one of their own — and so, it appears, is her killer. Ann was eight weeks pregnant with a child she and her police lieutenant husband, Ray Cruz, wanted desperately. The only clue to the outrage seems worse than no lead at all: A patrol car was spotted near the scene, disappearing into the fog. Against a backdrop of corrupt city politics, the delicate and dangerous undercover investigation of the police department falls to the victim’s brother, former detective Jim Weir, who left the force respecting its many secrets and now must expose them one by one. Jim’s understandably fierce pursuit of his sister’s tormentor is a perfect cover, something credible to the cops he is secretly probing. But it is also his genuine debt to Ann. And soon it becomes an agonizing race against Ray, his ex-partner and brother-in-law — because Ray is trying to find the killer first, and execute him.