BOOK REVIEW

Silent Joe by T. Jefferson Parker.  Edgar Allan Poe Award

(Brought to you by kat impatientreader.com)  Joe Trona is a strange guy. He's only twenty-four years old. Officially, he works as a deputy in the Orange County Sheriff's Department – specifically in the central jail complex.

Unofficially, he serves his adopted father Will Trona who is the Orange County Supervisor from the First District. Will Trona is a cutthroat politician who seeks power through intimidation, trading favors, and especially through knowing people's darkest secrets. Joe is his loyal bodyguard, chauffeur, and enforcer. Joe knows that his adopted father breaks laws and cheats on his wife, but Joe loves him too much to question his actions – especially when his results do more good for people than harm.

The reason Joe feels such love and loyalty for Will is because his biological parents were so worthless by contrast. His mother Charlotte was a cold, unloving woman who neglected him to run off with a biker gang. His sociopath father Thor threw acid in his face when he was a baby, leaving him with the horrific facial scars he would bear throughout his life. The Tronas found Joe at age six in an orphanage and gave him every advantage to get ahead in life. 

Now Joe has grown up to be a large, trim, young man. He's handsome aside from his scars, which scare people. He's a minor celebrity in Orange County because of his adopted father's political career, and because of the "Acid Baby" newspaper stories that documented his sensational beginnings. He knows he intimidates people so he compensates with stridently good manners and a rigid code of ethics, both of which make him seem like a West Point military cadet.  He is very shy and has never really dated women; at the same time, he has a fierce and unquenched sex drive.

The story opens when Will Trona tells Joe to drive him to pick up a "package." Will never explains anything; he merely says they will be doing a good deed.  Imagine Joe's surprise when the "package" they retrieve from a seedy apartment is a 12 year-old girl named Savannah.  Will and Joe hurry her to their car, but a few blocks away they get ambushed by five men who murder Will.  Savannah runs away into an alley. Joe manages to shoot two of the five men, and then the leader kills his last two followers and melts away into the darkness.

Grief-stricken, Joe tries to get Will to the hospital, but it's too late for his adopted father.  He returns to the scene of the crime to search for Savannah, but can't find her.  In the days that follow, Joe desperately sifts for clues to solve his father's murder. Certainly Will had a lot of enemies, so the suspects are legion.

Three distinct patterns begin to come clear. First, the five men who ambushed Will seem to belong to a vicious Vietnamese gang. The 12 year-old girl seems to have been kidnapped from a wealthy local family – by her own brother, an unstable young man who may or may not be acting in her best interests.  Finally, young Hispanic housekeeper was brutally murdered, and later found in the autopsy to have been pregnant.

How do these three events connect? Joe struggles for answers while the movers and shakers of Orange County politics try to curry favor with him, and groom him to succeed his father's power base. Little does he know that he will find true love, and face down his biggest personal demon in the form of his biological father who comes looking for him once more. Silent Joe is an absorbing read that is available on Amazon through this link:

Silent Joe: A Novel

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