Chuck Frye is a down-and-out California surfer, happy riding the waves in Newport Beach, until his big brother’s Vietnamese bride is kidnapped on stage during one of her popular cabaret performances in Little Saigon. Chuck knows much more about riding waves than he does about his war-hero brother’s past, and soon finds himself in a deadly world of refugee passions and politics, at the center of … of which is his brother’s mysterious, lovely wife.
“Little Saigon is a great mystery thriller but to say so may be doing it an injustice. It may also be the first major novel to explore that strange new neighborhood set somewhere between the American mainstream and the Mekong Delta.”
—– Donald Stanwood
“Parker is a glowing fixture in the thriller firmament.”
—– Kirkus Reviews
“Slick and elegant…It’s a swell book to read.”
—– Los Angeles Times
“A very polished and deeply felt performance.”
— Donald Stanwood
About the Author: T. Jefferson Parker is the author of nineteen crime novels, and a three-time winner of the Edgar Award. He lives in Southern California.
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Little Saigon is Parker’s second published novel, and as such is stylistically much more like Laguna Heat than the much later Charlie Hood series. It’s also the closest he came (at least among the books of his I’ve read) to writing political intrigue rather than a straight-ahead detective mystery.
Parker’s protagonist Charlie Frye is a fired newspaper reporter, a fading surfing champion, and something of a screwup. When his golden-boy brother’s Vietnamese wife Li is kidnapped in the Orange County of 1985, Frye gets dragged into the family’s hunt for her.
Frye has little more to go on than his reporter’s instincts and a sheer cussedness that keeps him soldiering on even when circumstances drag him through some unpleasant situations and general physical danger. As such, he’s the archetypal amateur detective, a trope that usually doesn’t make a great deal of sense but works in this case for one main reason: Chuck is the black-sheep scion of the enormously wealthy and powerful Frye family (a thinly disguised version of the Irvines of Southern California), is known by other wealthy-and-powerful people, and as such gets a bye for doing things that would get us ordinary folk tossed in the can. Luckily, Parker lets Frye flail around and make bad decisions so his amateur status is credible and so he doesn’t turn into Miss Marple in board shorts (which didn’t exist back then anyway).
The bulk of the action centers around the émigré community called Little Saigon in Westminster, the largest collection of Vietnamese outside Vietnam. As it turns out, Li is a heroine of the post-war resistance to the Communist government of Vietnam. Parker manages to guide us along the ever-more-tangled plots and factions in this insular community without leaving us in a knot, although if you’re unused to international intrigue, you may find the names a rough go at first.
The passions that still ran high in 1985 have cooled somewhat thirty years on (although they still fly the old South Vietnamese flag down here), but Parker’s descriptions make it easy to connect to this bygone time. His settings are less photorealistic than in Laguna Heat but are still atmospheric and at times reach a lushness you won’t find in his more current writing. But his greatest strength lies in his characterizations, in the way even secondary characters have dimensions usually afforded only the hero and villain in other books. Everyone has shadows and secrets in this book – some you can predict, some you can’t, some that appear only long after the clues have drizzled in. This is one thing that hasn’t changed with Parker’s writing, and the thing that keeps me coming back.
I picked this up along with Wambaugh’s The Golden Orange to see how other authors handle an Orange County setting (where a great deal of my WIP is set). I didn’t expect (but should have) what a time capsule this is. If you remember Orange County from the 1980s, you’ll keep tripping over “oh, yeah, I remember that” moments; if you don’t, you’ll get a view of what the place was like before Real Housewives and The Hills hit town.
Little Saigon isn’t necessarily a must-read but is a fine way to spend a few hours if you’re in the mood for some Southern California noir. Don’t blame me if you come out craving pho.