The Wall Street Journal-20080216-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Books- Chalk Dust and Fingerprints

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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Books: Chalk Dust and Fingerprints

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L.A. Outlaws

By T. Jefferson Parker

Dutton, 372 pages, $25.95

SUZANNE Jones: by day, a middle-school teacher and single mother of three; by night, or whenever else it pleases her, the masked "Allison Murrieta" -- a media-darling criminal who robs the greedy, gives some of her take to charity and poses for cellphone photos during her escapades. Whether she is, as she claims, a descendant of Joaquin Murrieta -- a bandit during California's Gold Rush days known as the Robin Hood of El Dorado -- she is his spiritual kin.

During one caper in "L.A. Outlaws," the latest thriller by Southern California writer T. Jefferson Parker, Suzanne brings her schoolteacher-self inadvertently to the unwanted attention of a villain much less whimsical and romantic than she. Suzanne also catches the eye of policeman Charlie Hood, whose investigation is mixed with a lustful curiosity that she does nothing to discourage.

While Suzanne drives the action, Officer Hood is the novel's moral center: an Iraq-war vet with a complicated family history, painful secrets and ethical debts. As always, Mr. Parker's characters are compelling and well drawn, and his plot propels them through busy sequences filled with surprising turns. But what sticks most in a reader's mind, once the story is done, are the subtle touches: involuntary sense-memories, poetic one-line weather-reports ("the L.A. sky is orange and gray and the air smells like flowers and exhaust"), occasional moments of personal redemption. There is more to "L.A. Outlaws" than thrills.

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Mr. Nolan is the author of "Ross Macdonald: A Biography."