Beach Books - Matching characters with memories
Palos Verdes Blue, by John Shannon (Pegasus Books, 320 pp., $25)
by Bondo Wyszpolski
John Shannon writes fast-paced “neo-noir” thrillers set in Southern California, and Palos Verdes Blue, set largely in and around Lunada Bay, but also in the surrounding areas of Torrance and Redondo Beach, is the eleventh in the Jack Liffey series.
Liffey tracks down missing children, although in one of his former lives he worked in aerospace, had a nice home, wife, and daughter. Now’s he’s divorced and living in East L.A. with a Latina cop named Gloria. It’s a curious relationship and somehow potentially volatile. For the time being, an ailing dog named Loco keeps it together.
Liffey’s main connection to the South Bay is his daughter, Maeve, who is a junior at Redondo Union High School. She’s a strange cookie, too, having gotten involved with a much-older gangbanger and now sporting a tattoo on her breast and an abortion as souvenirs of this misadventure. This time around she’ll have sexual identity issues, but Liffey is a tolerant guy so she’s extra lucky in one respect.
Liffey’s ex-wife Kathy has a friend in P.V. named Helen Hostetler, whose daughter Blaine has gone missing. Blaine makes even less of an appearance in Palos Verdes Blue than Rima does in Green Mansions, but her elusiveness gives the book its title, sort of. Her nickname is Blue, and perhaps it has something to do with the endangered species of butterfly up there on the Hill called Palos Verdes Blue.
Well, that’s one mystery solved.
Blaine or Blue is an idealistic young woman and she’s doing her part to save the butterfly by weeding out invasive species of plant life from the butterfly’s diminishing habitat. Her humanitarian concerns lead her to befriend some Mexican migrant workers living in the canyons, and apparently she’s been bringing them food. The migrants are camping out in P.V. because, by day, they’re working as gardeners or housekeepers for the families in the large homes, saving up money to send to relatives in Mexico (or in other Latin American countries).
This gets Blue into trouble, but presumably it’s not the Mexicans who are behind her disappearance. Just as we have the Bay Boys, territorial surfers who feel – strongly – that surfing in Lunada Bay should be for locals only, we also have a kind of Aryan supremacy brotherhood that feels the country is being overrun and polluted by illegals from south of the border.
The author, John Shannon, grew up during the late 1950s and early ‘60s in San Pedro, and he knows the area well. His protagonist is 60 years old, an aging sleuth who reminds me of Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza’s Inspector Espinosa, who solves crimes in Rio de Janeiro. I’ve enjoyed the latter’s books because I spent a bit of time in Rio – Ipanema, Leblon, Copacabana, etc. – but I know even more about Palos Verdes. Much of Shannon’s novel takes place in Lunada Bay, and that’s where I lived – I was lucky with the horses back then – for 10 years.
From a personal point of view, then, it’s fun to scratch my head and compare my memories of people, especially younger people, with those of Shannon’s characters. In the book, a lot of the rich kids seem stuck up and/or ill-mannered. Actually, the families that I remember were fairly wholesome – there were hardly any broken homes and most people were remarkably down-to-earth. But that was a while back, and for all I know Shannon is right and the place has gone to the dogs.

Anyway, Liffey befriends a young Mexican named Jaime, while Liffey’s daughter tries to befriend one of the Bay Boys named Brandon “Twitch” Dedrick. Shannon weaves in a few of the letters that Jaime is writing to his sister and that Twitch is writing to his estranged father. Shannon reveals a talent for interweaving several plots and subplots simultaneously, a couple of pages here, a couple there, and this has the effect of making us read on.
Some of the characters are marginally convincing, and the same goes for the various scenes and situations in the fabric of the story. What I like best about Palos Verdes Blue is that it humanizes the Mexican day laborers of the Beach Cities Communities. It’s one aspect that will linger after the explosive grand finale of the last few pages. ER