My local reading friend and I both love mysteries so we were talking about writers who won or were nominated for the yearly Edgars. From there we went on a venture to find and read as many authors as possible in that category. T. Jefferson Parker was Sandy’s find and she was bragging about him from the first book. I was reading Michael Connelly and figured he couldn’t be as good as she felt he was because I had never heard of him. Wrong once again. Great book, great characters and great plot all wrapped up into this nice package.Detective Robbie Brownlaw was thrown from a six story building while trying to save an occupant who happened to be a little drunk and a lot suicidal. Robbie survives but is left with synesthesia, a neurological condition where your senses get ‘mixed up.’ His form of synesthesia is his ability to see colored forms from the mouths of people when they are talking so that he ‘sees’ their real emotion regardless of what they say. This gives him the ability to hear what people are saying and determine at the same time their real emotion. For example, a lie or deception would have red squares floating from their mouth, so Robbie knows the person is lying. Robbie sees all other human emotions such as sympathy, anger, apathy, happiness, violence or envy all with different shapes and colors. Envy is indeed the color green.This ability assists Robbie as a detective with the San Diego Police Department however no one knows of his ability except his adored wife, Gina. He’s kept his ability to himself in part because he feels the SDPD would not allow him to continue in his career and others, of course, would think he was crazy or odd. They do already because he survived the six story fall.A fellow officer of a separate ethics law enforcement agency commits suicide while investigating ethics violations in city government and it is quickly determined to be a murder. Robbie and his partner Detective Mackenzie Cortez are assigned to the investigation which leads them to unravel what the ethics officer discovered. Two personal matters interfere with the investigation, both Robbie’s personal life with his wife Gina and the personal life of the ethics detective. This was one of those books I did not want to put down. You’ve read them. I hated it when at night I would fall asleep reading because I would have read until the wee hours of the morning. Looking back at the Jeff Parker books I’ve read, I gave two three stars and two, including this one, four stars. Damn good track record for an author I didn’t know and wasn’t even interested in reading. This one deserved all four stars and perhaps five if I wasn’t so stingy with those five stars.
Robbie Brownlaw is high on life, working at the job he's always wanted and married to the girl of his dreams. He's about to learn one of life's most important lessons, however; everything can change in the blink of an eye. Brownlaw is one of the most interesting fictional detectives on my reading list. As The Fallen opens, he's literally taking a fall, from the 6th story of a burning San Diego hotel. He survives, but develops synesthesia. In his case, Robbie can see colors representative of the speaker's emotion while he's conversing with them. That unsettling conditions comes in handy when he questions witnesses, but it sure doesn't make his personal relationships easy to maintain. Imagine knowing instantly that someone is lying to you, or jealous.Robbie's been back on the job for a few months, when an officer from the city's ethics commission is brutally murdered. His investigation takes him into the seamy underside of San Diego, a city that's so beautiful on the surface. As he proceeds with his inquiries, Brownlaw encounters high priced call girls, cops on the take, corrupt city officials, and the victim's wife, who has now lost both her little daughter and her husband within the space of nine months. In the midst of the turmoil, Robbie's own wife deserts him, leaving him stunned and heartbroken.Intriguing, fully developed characters, suspenseful and dramatic plot, and well-honed prose combine to make The Fallen a high quality page turner. Now I'm off to check out Parker's other books.
What do You think about The Fallen (2007)?
In The Fallen, Homicide detective Robbie Brownlaw, after being thrown out of a 6th floor window and receiving minor brain injuries, now sees shapes and colors denoting the emotions of a person when they speak. This is just one form of a condition called synesthesia. When a member of the Ethics Authority is murdered, Brownlaw finds himself on the case and in the middle of a web of corruption involving members of the San Diego elite from the police department all the way up to the office of the mayor. Did one of them kill Garrett Asplundh for what he knew? Or was it for some other reason altogether? While T. Jefferson Parker weaves words like no other, creating a tapestry of an almost dream-like reality, I was frequently left somewhat cold in the plot itself. It frequently took long, wandering curves that really didn't do much for the story itself - although maybe the point was that the story itself was about life. However, the overall effect was disjointed and difficult - I found it hard to stay inside the book. Nonetheless, I rated it a 4 merely due to the sheer beauty of his writing; it was like being in a trance and just letting the words wash over me. Therefore, I cannot write this book off as a loss.
—Katy
"The Fallen" is four-fifths one of the best books I've ever read, and one-fifth a shaggy-dog story that doesn't quite pay off what has come before. Even so, it is a gripping page-turner. The protagonist is Robbie Brownlaw, a San Diego cop who cheats death after being thrown from a high window, and emerges not so much with scars, but with something extra. In Robbie's case, the extra is the ability to see someone's emotions as visible, colored shapes. In this way he can tell if a witness is lying. This kind of gimmick is tricky in a crime novel, since it can be a cheat if it's overused, but Parker walks that tightrope very skillfully. Only the denouement, which more or less jettisons the complex, fascinating puzzle that Parker has established over three hundred pages, seems like a letdown.
—Michael Mallory
This was one of those random finds on the public library's e-books list that was available for check out, all the popular ones were taken. So I decided what the heck, and was pleasantly surprised. This is essentially a suspense thriller, and it kept me engaged, certainly more engaged than Girl With The Dragon Tattoo did! Robbie Brownlaw is a cop who's life is good on all counts. He enjoys his job, is married to the love of his life, everything is hunky-dory till he is thrown out of a window on the fourth floor of a burning building. He survives the fall, but ends up with synesthesia, he sees emotions as coloured shapes when people talk. As Robbie works on his assigned case, things begin to unravel in his personal life. In the end, it's not just about Robbie finding the killer, but also about finding himself. With a plot line that keeps you guessing to the end, well-etched characters, and layers to the narrative, this is a read I definitely recommend if you are partial to the suspense thriller genre.
—Vidya Ananthanarayanan
