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"[...]the milk-and-orange-blossoms smell of Gwen, bass scent of his life. All the other notes that came to him - coastal sage and the ocean, the new car leather - were just the riffs and fills."

We meet the Orange County Sheriff's Deputy Archie Wildcraft as he is driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, past Crystal Cove (a scenic place I visited last month) with his beautiful wife Gwen. It is Gwen's birthday and they are just returning home from a party. They will make love on the beach, and later that night, when they are back home, Gwen will be killed and Archie will have a bullet lodged in his brain.

Leading the investigation is Merci Rayborn (for me, an unforgettable character from The Blue Hour), who is battling her own demons, personal and professional. The Newport Beach Sheriff's department is divided about her because of her testimony that exposed corrupt cops. Merci discovers that Archie and Gwen had made some amazingly profitable stock investments. More and more circumstantial evidence points to Archie's being the killer, yet Merci does not want to believe it; quite likely because he had defended Merci when many in the department ostracized her. Archie regains consciousness and ... that's it for spoilers from me.

Like The Blue Hour, this is a very good procedural. Handling the crime scene, autopsy, goings on in a firearms examination room are shown with meticulous attention to detail and exude plausibility. Scenes of conversations with the victims' families, friends, and business acquaintances offer great characterizations of minor characters. Most importantly, for me anyway, we are getting outstanding writing, for a thriller. I liked several metaphors a lot, for instance, "[...] now the sentence hung in the air, blatant and tactile, like a spider at the end of a strand."

Merci comes across perhaps a bit less believable than in the previous novel, but she still feels almost like a real person. I am happy to meet "well grounded" Francisco again (now called Frank) - what a wonderful touch by the author! On the other hand, I am shaving my rating by half a star because of the histrionic, melodramatic, and implausible scene on Santiago Peak. Still, I think that T. Jefferson Parker's Black Water (2002) is a very good novel and recommend it highly.

Three-and-a-half stars.