{"id":6744,"date":"2017-07-24T07:12:38","date_gmt":"2017-07-24T11:12:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6744"},"modified":"2017-07-24T07:12:38","modified_gmt":"2017-07-24T11:12:38","slug":"the-last-meridian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6744","title":{"rendered":"****The Last Meridian"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Los

photo: Alissa Walker, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By Joe Hefferon \u2013 The author spent a quarter-century \u201cin law enforcement\u201d in gritty Newark, New Jersey. In this, his first full-length novel, he\u2019s created an engaging female protagonist in a jam who turns to a private detective for help, and he set the story in and around Los Angeles. On the surface, his characters are savvy and confident\u2014on top of the world\u2014but underneath, well, it\u2019s more complicated. The book\u2019s brief prologue has a particularly engaging first line: \u201cThe coroner\u2019s wagon had a flat tire.\u201d Nothing good can follow.<\/p>\n

Sixteen years before the novel begins, now-successful Hollywood interior designer Nina Ferrer lived in Chicago and gave up an illegitimate son because she was too young, too unready, and too unwilling to raise a child alone. She abandoned her child and the Midwest for a better, more glamorous life. It turned out she has a talent for perfectly divining the aspirations of her well-paying clients, making their homes an expression of their best selves. Her own home, however, is empty of love, as she and her wealthy businessman (and Cuban cigar-smuggling) husband have long since lost interest in each other.<\/p>\n

Still, her life is reasonably well-ordered until she receives a telegram saying that her son back in Illinois has been accused of murder. His adoptive mother swears he is innocent, but she can\u2019t afford a proper defense, and unless some kind of deus ex machina appears\u2014most likely in the form of Nina herself\u2014the boy is doomed to a lengthy prison term.<\/p>\n

Nina\u2019s husband is unaware of the boy and at this late date, she doesn\u2019t want to tell him. So she travels all the way to dismal Bakersfield to find a private investigator and gets much more than she bargained for.<\/p>\n

The short chapters toggle back and forth mostly between events early in 1965 and toward the end of that year. The later scenes are a series of journalist interviews with Nina that take place after she\u2019s been incarcerated. You don\u2019t know why she\u2019s in custody or what is likely to happen to her until near the end of the story. Although Hefferon precedes each scene with the appropriate time stamp, this switching back and forth became a bit dizzying as the plot gains in complexity and the crimes that led to the boy\u2019s arrest are investigated.<\/p>\n

Hefferon\u2019s engaging presentation of Los Angeles and its denizens, its petty criminals, and the detective Nina hires all seem plausible. Yet the novel has an occasional unevenness of tone that is jarring and which Hefferon will probably overcome with more writing experience. At times it seems he\u2019s trying too hard to achieve a literary effect. Nevertheless, Hefferon is capable of pleasing on-point description. For example, \u201cWhether it was (the reporter\u2019s) inability to ask questions rapidly, or a natural gift for shutting up, he listened better than he talked, offering Nina a wide runway on which to land her story.\u201d<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll enjoy spending time with these characters and may conclude this is an author who, when his literary skills catch up to his gifts of characterization and plot development, may become highly regarded in the crime fiction field. It\u2019s gritty noir tinged with tinseltown glamour. And you may find these characters, especially the wise-cracking detective (whose wit is easily matched by that of Nina herself), modern incarnations of the types so well portrayed by Los Angeles literary icon Raymond Chandler<\/a> and his progeny.
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Joe Hefferon \u2013 The author spent a quarter-century \u201cin law enforcement\u201d in gritty Newark, New Jersey. In this, his first full-length novel, he\u2019s created an engaging female protagonist in a jam who turns to a private detective for help, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"****The Last Meridian - A debut thriller of today's Los Angeles--gritty noir touched with tinseltown","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,54,311,126],"tags":[1104,307,1105],"class_list":["post-6744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-detective","category-novel","category-reading-2","tag-joe-hefferon","tag-los-angeles","tag-the-last-meridian"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1KM","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6746,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6744\/revisions\/6746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}