Under a Perfect Sun

January Magazine and The Rap Sheet have both been quite complimentary in the past of novels by Southern California author Don Winslow, including California Fire and Life (1999) and The Power of the Dog (2005). But critic Cameron Hughes opines that Winslow has succeeded in setting his own literary bar higher with The Dawn Patrol. “[T]his new book,” he writes, “is one of the best private eye novels I’ve read in years.”

Boone Daniels used to be a cop. Now he’s a surfer in San Diego, California, obsessively checking how high the waves are and tracking where the epic swells will be on any given day. To support this habit, he does the bare minimum of work necessary, as a P.I. Life seems pretty darn good for Boone Daniels and his surfer buddies on “the Dawn Patrol.” So why is Daniels’ bank account empty? And why does he now spend countless nights trying to find the suspected rapist and killer of a 6-year-old girl--a case that got cold fast when he was on the San Diego Police Department and refused to torture information out of the favored suspect?

Daniels’ latest hiatus from the high curls and his surfing buddies finds him taking on what seems like a straightforward case, but--naturally--turns out to be much more complicated:

A striking female lawyer named Petra Hall, who represents a powerful law firm in San Diego, hires Boone to find a missing stripper, Tamara Roddick, who witnessed her boss engage in some insurance shenanigans of the arson variety. Boone figures he can locate Roddick, get her on the witness stand to testify, and then get back to the beach in time for a big swell promising huge waves that come only every few years. Things begin to get complicated, though, when a woman is found dead by a motel pool with the mislaid Ms. Roddick’s identification in her possession. Was the decedent pushed, or did she fall? And was the stripper Boone is looking for the intended victim?

From that point in the novel, we’re off, with Winslow leading us rapidly through a succession of intriguing episodes that take place on beautiful stretches of sand and in much darker places where evil events occur--events such as the children of illegal aliens being smuggled into Southern California for more than just borderline slavery. People don’t like to talk about such uncomfortable things, but author Winslow knows they go on and is willing to explore them in his fiction. He peels back the layers, revealing the corrupted soul of a city--San Diego--that’s paying the price for paradise.

Hughes’ full review of The Dawn Patrol can be found here.

READ MORE: “Don Winslow on Surf Noir; Appeal of Crime Fiction,” by Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg (The Wall Street Journal); “Don Winslow Talks to Ayo Onatade” (Shots).