Where Serpents Lie [Mass Market Paperback]

T. Jefferson Parker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1900

In this intense psychological thriller, Parker masterfully reinvents the classic loner cop: a man with a dark and violent past whose redemption can come only through saving others.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What novelist T. Jefferson Parker does so well in Where Serpents Lie (and in such previous high-octane outings as Laguna Heat and Pacific Beat) is to bind his characters tightly to the territory in which they live and die--the mostly scorched and urbanized but occasionally still pristine turf of Southern California's Orange County. When he's not running the Crimes Against Youth unit at the Orange County Sheriff's Department, Terry Naughton sits in a cave in Laguna Canyon, drinking tequila, smoking cigars, and trying to understand the twisted mind of a particularly vicious child molester called The Horridus. The serpents of the title are real, as is the terror Parker manages to evoke with the intense power of his writing. "I knew that there was no way that Lauren would ever have her childhood replaced with a better one," Naughton says about a 9- year-old girl sold for sex by her parents. "Lauren had the resigned eyes and the aura of passive invincibility found in nearly all children who have escaped to the last place they can go--to the private, silent cave of their own selves." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In his sixth thriller (after The Triggerman's Dance, Hyperion, 1996), Parker returns to Orange County, California, where cop Terry Naughton, head of Crimes Against Youth, a division he helped create, is fiercely trying to track down a creepy pedophile who calls himself Horridus (as in Crotalus horridus, or timber rattlesnake) before he kills one of the young girls that he has kidnapped. It seems that besides child pornography and rape, Horridus is also into snakes?really big, hungry snakes?and there's evidence that he has used these "pets" to dispose of victims in the past. But Naughton's case is thrown into limbo when he's arrested for pedophilia after damning photographs show up in a police raid. Was he set up, or are the photos genuine, as the FBI claims they are? This taut police procedural mixes high suspense with believable characters; it's a real page-turner. Recommended for all fiction collections.?Rebecca House Stankowski, Purdue Univ. Calumet Lib., Hammond, Ind.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 562 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion (January 1, 1900)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786889446
• ISBN-13: 978-0786889440
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.2 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #338,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

T. Jefferson Parker is the bestselling author of numerous novels, including Storm Runners and The Fallen. Alongside Dick Francis and James Lee Burke, Parker is one of only three writers to be awarded the Edgar Award for Best Novel more than once. Parker lives with his family in Southern California.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Darker Parker......, April 6, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Where Serpents Lie (Mass Market Paperback)

I first discovered T. Jefferson Parker in Silent Joe, a carefully crafted and intriguing story with a twist. Joe, a sweet man with a damaged face, is one of Parker's great heroes. Naughton, in Where Serpents Lie, is another. He's a self-acknowledged flawed character who lives with regret and sorrow and deception while struggling to do his job as head of the Crimes Against Youth division of the Orange County Sheriff's Office. I liked him immensely, perhaps because he is flawed enough to be real. The crimes against children which he investigates make your hair stand on end, partly because you know they really happen. But Parker appears to have done his research and presents the cases and circumstances with compassion while creating a villain who is both monstrous and yet sympathetic. This is an exciting if long read, maybe a trifle overwritten. The novel contains one glaring error that no other reviewer has commented on, so I will. After Naughton sees photos of himself that he knows are doctored, he goes to a friend and asks the friend to doctor some photos himself, of a woman bathing a child, a woman and child who have never actually met. Apparently, Naughton means to use this doctored photo as proof that the photos which resulted in his suspension from CAY were also doctored. As readers we get on board with this idea and wait to see what happens. But we wait in vain, for this entire plot line and the requested doctored photo is never heard of again. The photo never materializes and the friend is never again mentioned. It's an editor's job to catch these things so I blame him or her more than Parker himself for this big ooops. Other than that, Serpent is another winner in the Parker ouevre. I put Parker in the company of Dennis Lehane, James W. Hall, and Carl Hiassen--all gifted writers and good storytellers.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Detective's Dark Side, October 23, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Where Serpents Lie (Mass Market Paperback)

This is a big chunk of a book: 557 pages of thick type, a Stephen King-length piece of modern fiction reading. But "Where Serpents Lie," while following a well-worn path of sociopath criminal novels ("Red Dragon" comes immediately to mind), moves quickly and is very exciting. The reader is spared wordy digressions, long explanations of the obvious. One-dimensional supporting characters also are kept at a minimum. A notable virtue is the author's careful avoidance of excess gore: the book's not an exercise in can-you-top-this gruesomeness. It shows restraint. And yet that does not detract from its power. In fact, the truly awful crimes are hinted at, they are threatened, looming like a distant but approaching summer thunderstorm, with the beginnings of a corkscrew tornado cloud descending. The most disturbing undertone may lie in the protaginist's psyche. A detective leading the investigation of a potential child killer, he's recovering from the death of his own son, in a seeming accident, although the details of that aren't revealed until the shattering final chapters. Indeed, that mystery is the greatest, as the "Horridus" storyline is strictly paint-by-numbers. Thrown in, to great effect, is the possibility that the policeman might have some truly pervese instincts himself. You never are given so much information that you can judge, 'til the smoke clears at the end. Mr. Parker's language is as clear as a reporter's, and he does not insult the reader's intelligence, clearly the biggest fault of most popular crime fiction. I'll be picking up more of his books to see if he's the real thing. With a few more plot twists and refractions on the central storyline, "Where Serpents Lie" could have been a classic. As it is, great potential is the verdict.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If you really like TV's 'Millennium', then you'll love this., November 10, 1999

By 

Jayson (Rancho Santa Margarita, ca, United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Where Serpents Lie (Hardcover)

What makes T. Jefferson Parker's novels so great are the way that they paint a picture in your head on how twisted people can become.

While being a regular detective/mystery thriller novel, this one leads a little to the darker things in life and some very strange and bizzarre rituals that the 'baddie' involves us in.

Also there are a few sub plots to the book that really display great character development. There are a few instances of real page turners where you the author shocks you and your jaw drops.

What stops this from 5 stars is a slightly 'hokey' climax, and a very quick resloution to one of the sub-plots, but on the whole a very eerie, bordering on supernatural thriller.