The Blue Hour
By T. Jefferson Parker
Hyperion, 2000, $7.99
Red Light
By T. Jefferson Parker
Hyperion, 2001, $7.99
Black Water
By T. Jefferson Parker
Hyperion, 2003, $7.99
Maybe the series is over, though. Each book in the series tells a discrete mystery story — and while each also expertly advances the character of Merci Rayborn, the series protagonist, she has perhaps, by the end of “Black Water,” the third novel, found as much emotional closure as is possible for her.
Merci (the first name is pronounced in the French fashion), a deputy sheriff with the Orange County, Calif., Sheriff’s Department, is one of Parker’s typically well characterized protagonists, but she is not altogether an attractive character. She is a big woman but beautiful, which often gets her hit on by male co-workers, a situation she can usually handle with ease. Like most cops, for obvious reasons, on the job she trusts nobody. But like some, she finds herself unable to come home without bringing the attitude with her. This makes her a bristly character with acquaintances and friends, with her father (himself a retired deputy), and even with her occasional boyfriends — one of whom, inexplicably, keeps coming back.
In fact, she seems able to feel at ease enough to communicate with only two people. One is her toddler son, the product of Merci’s brief affair with a partner, the only man Merci ever really loved, who is killed by the villain of “The Blue Hour.” Merci later killed the villain.
The other “person” with whom Merci can communicate is “Francis,” or “Frank,” the name she gives to the collection of bones of a hundreds-of-years-old Spanish explorer she finds buried in her back yard. But the son replies with mostly nonsense, and Frank — though she has mentioned him to colleagues and many regard him as a living boyfriend — doesn’t talk back at all.
Merci is ambitious, with designs on becoming sheriff before she is 60. The events of the first two books make it doubtful that she will reach her goal, however. The mistake she made at the end of “The Blue Hour,” getting trapped by the villain and putting her partner in peril, is mostly a mistake only in her own mind — but it has shaken her confidence in her work.
The plot of “Red Light,” the Edgar-nominated second book, makes her something of a pariah within the Sheriff’s Department. Concurrent with her investigation of a recent murder, Merci is given a “cold case” to investigate — the murder of a young woman many years before. Merci finds new leads in the case, which is to her credit as an investigator. But to her sorrow, she becomes convinced that a sheriff’s deputy did the killing and that a sizable coterie in the Sheriff’s Department covered it up. The resultant investigation implicates, among others, the current sheriff, Merci’s own father and the father of her boyfriend.
The loss of the sheriff to the department is a particular blow to Merci, since she was depending on him to be her “rabbi” in her rise through the ranks.
Now she seems stalled — particularly as “Black River” begins. The shooting death of a woman and the near-death of her husband, another deputy, appear to be an open-and-shut case of murder-attempted suicide. The evidence against the man appears overwhelming, particularly since his head wound leaves him unable to remember what happened. The suspect compounds the suspicions of him by checking himself out of the hospital early, ostensibly to track down the real killer.
But Merci believes the man to be innocent, and she resists all arguments to the effect that she is defending him simply because she doesn’t want to be involved in another case in which a deputy is the shooter. She becomes even more of a pariah in some quarters because her stand pits her against some eager-beaver deputies, a headline-hunting, newly appointed sheriff, and a district attorney hungry for a conviction. Nor does it help matters that the suspect is known to have been a staunch supporter of Merci, defending — even to the point of fisticuffs at least once — her ethical decision in “Red Light.”
“The Blue Hour” is a well-told mystery story. “Red Light,” perhaps the best of the lot, is a complex story of the simultaneous investigation of two cases that don’t interlock. And “Black River” is a wonderfully complicated story of a multileveled murder investigation. As Parker’s series progresses, the outlines of his books become more complex and Merci Rayborn’s character becomes more detailed.
