Joseph Schneider's depiction of LA is compelling, as is the premise behind this thriller. A police detective with a classical education in charge of a most diabolical murder scene: the beginning is deliciously written. Just listen:
There was no stillness in the city. It was a constant, churning stew
of action and reaction, as if the people’s drives and passions were in a
way linked to the volatile, unquiet land itself. The land that, carried
along the scar of the San Andreas fault, moved inexorably northward up the continental plate, its passage marked by cataclysmic
bursts of seismic energy. There was no changing its violent destiny.
It was already shaped and mapped out by the tremendous forces
at work below the surface. Los Angeles would one day become an
Alaskan suburb, appearing off the coast of Anchorage in about
seventy-five million years. Not that long, geologically speaking.
There was no stillness in the city. It was a constant, churning stew
of action and reaction, as if the people’s drives and passions were in a
way linked to the volatile, unquiet land itself. The land that, carried
along the scar of the San Andreas fault, moved inexorably northward up the continental plate, its passage marked by cataclysmic
bursts of seismic energy. There was no changing its violent destiny.
It was already shaped and mapped out by the tremendous forces
at work below the surface. Los Angeles would one day become an
Alaskan suburb, appearing off the coast of Anchorage in about
seventy-five million years. Not that long, geologically speaking.