The Fallen

My life was ordinary until three years ago when I was thrown out of a downtown hotel window. My name is Robbie Brownlaw, and I am a homicide detective for the city of San Diego. I am twenty-nine years old. I now have synesthesia, a neurological condition where your senses get mixed up. Sometimes when people talk to me, I see their voices as colored shapes provoked by the emotions of the speakers, not by the words themselves. I have what amounts to a primitive lie detector. After three years, I don't pay a whole lot of attention to the colors and shapes of other people's feelings, unless they don't match up with their words. When Garrett Asplundh's body is found under a San Diego bridge, Robbie Brownlaw and his partner, McKenzie Cortez, are called on to the case. After the tragic death of his child and the dissolution of his marriage, Garrett — regarded as an honest, straight-arrow officer — left the SDPD to become an ethics investigator, looking into the activities of his former colleagues. At first his death, which takes place on the eve of a reconciliation with his ex, looks like suicide, but the clues Brownlaw and Cortez find just don't add up. With pressure mounting from the police and the city's politicians, Brownlaw fights to find the truth, all the while trying to hold on to his own crumbling marriage. Was Garrett's death an execution or a crime of passion, a personal vendetta or the final step in an elaborate cover-up? Amid rampant corruption and tightening city purse strings, whatever conclusion Brownlaw comes to, the city of San Diego — and Brownlaw's life — hangs in the balance. A carefully woven novel of suspense, The Fallen brings to life a superb cast of charactersagainst the all-too-real backdrop of a city fighting for its survival. Hailed by critics as a powerhouse writer (New York Times) and a thinking man's bestseller (Washington Post), T. Jefferson Parker delivers his most elegantly written, suspenseful, and moving novel yet.

Robbie Brownlaw was an ordinary cop, working fraud for the San Diego Police Department, when he was thrown out of a sixth floor window at the Las Palmas Hotel. Everyone expected he would die from the fall. When he didn't, he became an unlikely hero. Rewarded with two rapid-fire promotions, Robbie became the youngest homicide detective on the SDPD. Garrett Asplundh had been a Professional Standards Unit sergeant, the cops that watch the cops, until his daughter drowned in a swimming pool, destroying his career and his marriage. After leaving the PSU, Garret took a job as an investigator for the San Diego Ethics Authority Enforcement Unit. On the eve of a possible reconciliation with his estranged wife, Garrett is found dead in his car underneath the Cabrillo Bridge. Robbie investigates...

A good cop, Robbie Brownlaw was thrown from a sixth-floor window of a downtown hotel and miraculously survived. The traumatic incident left Robbie with a fast-track career in the San Diego P.D.'s Homicide division . . . and a rare neurological condition that enables him to see people's emotional words as colored shapes—green trapezoids of envy, red squares of deception . . .

Another good man lies dead in a blood-splattered Ford Explorer—an ex-cop-turned-ethics investigator whose private life was torn open by unthinkable tragedy. Whether Garrett Asplundh's death was suicide or murder isn't immediately apparent—but it's soon clear to Robbie and his smart, tough partner, McKenzie Cortez, that Garrett had hard evidence of sex, scandal, and corruption spreading deep into local government. But pursuing the truth could prove more emotionally devastating than Robbie ever imagined.

T. Jefferson Parker won an Edgar Award for California Girl and received the Edgar and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his novel Silent Joe. His other novels include Cold Pursuit, The Fallen, and Storm Runners. Mr. Parker lives in Fallbrook, California.