Joe's Reviews > A Thousand Steps

My introduction to T. Jefferson Parker is A Thousand Steps. Parker was born, raised, schooled, and has lived and worked in Orange County, California all his life, starting as a reporter for the Newport Ensign in 1978 covering police and city hall. His first novel, Laguna Heat, was adapted into a movie by HBO in 1987. Published in 2022, A Thousand Steps feels like a book that had been percolating deliciously in the coffee urn of the county sheriff. Set in Laguna Beach in the summer of 1968, its more coming of age story than thriller, in which a sixteen-year-old boy goes in search of his missing sister and becomes an adult.

Matt Anthony lives day to day on a paperboy's salary, delivering the Orange County Register from his bicycle. His mother Julie exists in a state of arrested development. With her waitress hours at the Jolly Roger cut (the beach town's burgeoning hippie population scare away tourists and don't tip) it's often left to Matt to feed himself. His brother Kyle is on short time finishing his tour of duty in Vietnam, while his father Bruce has been AWOL for six years, a rugged individualist who struggles to hold down a job in law enforcement but is also infuriated by the drug culture that pervades Laguna Beach.

Matt is developing into a painter and a fisherman. He doesn't experiment with drugs like Julie but does spend time at a head shop called Mystic Arts World, where Timothy Leary and a variety of characters hang out. The store is owned by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a legally registered church rumored to be illegally smuggling hashish. Matt finds this scene "funny and crazy and maybe a little dangerous," while his eighteen-year-old sister Jasmine, who cultivates a cool and removed vibe, calls the shop "horny." After watching police pull the body of his sister's classmate Bonnie Stratmeyer out of the surf, Matt is concerned that Jazz didn't come home last night.

Out in the garage, Matt stashes his fishing gear and takes off the poncho for the warming June day. He leaves the big door up to let in some sun. The garage has two windows, the heavy spring-loaded door for cars, and a narrow convenience door for people.

His mattress, sleeping bag, and pillow are on the floor. There are orange-crates stacked for his books and painting supplies, a desk and a chair. One overhead light operated by a wall switch. There's a pulsing blue lava lamp, a gift from Jazz. His current painting is a mess of a seascape, half-done if that, propped on a wounded thrift-store chair. Matt keeps his garage clean but creatures get in under the doors, mice sometimes, earwigs and spiders, and once in a while, a scorpion.

Now his mother stands just outside the garage, framed in sunlight. Julie's wearing her Jolly Roger Restaurant waitress uniform--a red wench's blouse with a plunging neckline and off-the-should sleeves, black pantaloons, red socks, and hideous black buckled slippers. Her dark hair up, Matt thinks she looks too young to be his mom.

"I'm off to work, Matty. Are you copacetic with what you saw?"

"I've never seen a dead person before."

The dead frogs in biology were bad enough. The smell of formaldehyde. Bonnie looked so cold.

What's dynamite about A Thousand Steps is how Parker charts Matt's development into an adult with his investigation into his sister's disappearance. His childhood has already left the station. Matt lives in a garage, works full-time and scraps for his next meal. But any hope for an endless summer evaporates quickly. Jazz's disappearance defines Matt's relationship with his absentee parents, his sweetheart Laurel Kalina and the authorities who want Matt to snitch. He can't remain a kid and follow his sister down whatever hole she's fallen into. The mystery forces him to confront big questions about who he is and what he believes.

Parker writes in historic present tense, which I don't believe I've encountered before. This is a vivid and casual narrative choice that seems cut from Parker's background as a journalist. I was thrown into the story, invited in, like a movie script would do. Since I prefer action-oriented novels that I can picture moving across a screen, I liked this choice.

With a jump of heart, Matt recognizes the Kalina sisters, Laurel and Rose. Laurel is his age and he's had a crush on her since fourth grade. He's gone to school with her all his life. Rose goes to college but Matt doesn't know where. Laurel told him once that they are part Hawaiian and part German-English. They're olive-skinned and dark-haired and to Matt, thrilling. One of this first fourth-grade cursive sentences was, She's beautiful!, which he tore off and wadded up and put in his pocket the second he'd written it.

Whereas every character in an Elmore Leonard novel feels like someone I could run into at the hardware store, the Lagunians in this book didn't seem like people Matt would. They seemed more like characters he'd encounter on a TV show, colorful but superficial. Maybe this is how teenagers view adults, but it left me wanting more depth. As far as the kidnapping plot, I could only hope that child abductions followed a script like this. Because I do live in Southern California and am always looking for a good L.A. novel, I appreciated the panache Parker carried this off with and how tender it was, a welcome vacation from the hard-edged cops or private eyes of other mysteries.