Writing in the Dark : Author: T. Jefferson Parker was penning the moody ‘Pacific Beat’ when his personal life wasn’t so sunny, either.

LAGUNA BEACH — T. Jefferson Parker’s moody new mystery thriller, “Pacific Beat,” is the author’s most complexly plotted novel to date, a tale of murder, intrigue and family secrets set in Newport Beach.

Acknowledging that “Pacific Beat,” due in bookstores next week, “is really a pretty dark book,” Parker says he drew on what was happening in his life at the time “to bring an emotional truth and resonance to the story.”

“Pacific Beat,” says Parker, was written “under duress.”

Midway through writing the book in 1989, Parker’s mother died of a brain tumor; three months later, Catherine (Cat), his rock-singer wife of little more than a year, also found out she had a brain tumor. She underwent surgery last November and is undergoing chemotherapy.

“It was a huge shock, and obviously I didn’t get a lot of work done for a while,” says Parker, 37, seated on a sofa in the book-lined study of his house high above LagunaCanyon. “I think the way this affected the work is kind of odd,” he says. “When you come face to face in your life with a potentially tragic situation like that, or a situation that’s dangerous, and then you sit down in your little study to write chapter four of your new thriller, you become aware of the gaps between your life and your work.”

He pauses to tap a cigarette ash into his empty root beer can.

“I think in some ways Cat’s illness and the things that have been going on here distance you from the work a little bit in emotional terms,” he says. “But I think, in some ways, it helped the writing in that it allowed me to see the writing as black ink on white paper. I didn’t have time to sit around for hours and hours and anguish about each and every nuance of the book.”

Describing his mother’s death and his wife’s illness as “a one-two punch that knocked me out for awhile,” Parker says that “when I got off the canvas and started working again, the work actually became kind of an escape, kind of a vacation in a way.”

Parker didn’t have to do much research for “Pacific Beat”: He lived in Newport Beach for several years a decade ago.

As a novice newspaper reporter for the weekly Newport Ensign in 1979, he moved within walking distance of the newspaper office into the cheapest digs he could find--an old yellow motel on the Balboa Peninsula called the El Mar (“Vacancies, Refrigeration”).

It’s the same shabby motel where Joseph Goins, the convicted sex offender and prime suspect in the novel, lives. Says Parker with a grin: “I remember walking into that place when I first rented it and thinking, ‘God, it looks like somewhere where a madman would live.’ ”

Parker wasted no time for the plot of “Pacific Beat” to kick in:

Just back from an underwater treasure-hunting expedition to Mexico where he wound up in jail, ex-cop Jim Weir returns home to the Balboa Peninsula to learn that his sister, Ann, and her Newport Beach cop husband, Raymond Cruz, are expecting a baby.

The joyous reunion, however, quickly turns to tragedy. Within hours of Weir’s return, Ann’s body is found in the Back Bay. She has been raped and stabbed, a bouquet of purple roses stuffed down the waist of her skirt. When evidence indicates that Ann may have been having an affair and that she may have been murdered by a cop, Weir is enlisted by the police chief to do an undercover investigation.

Publishers Weekly calls “Pacific Beat” a “powerful, unforgettable story of murder and corruption told in prose as sparkling and tough as any devotee of the hard-boiled tradition could wish, a tale that fulfills all the promise of his smash (1985) debut ‘Laguna Heat.’ ”

Kirkus Reviews calls the novel a “moodily intense affair. . . . A hothouse of full-bloomed characters and ripe emotions. Not as much fun ‘Laguna Heat’--the action is too slowly deliberate and sometimes overwhelmed by introspection--but a wiser, more mature work, resonant, literate, and powerful.”

Says Parker: “They’re right: It’s less fun that ‘Laguna Heat.’ There’s less a feeling at the end of rebirth and renewal. And there’s more of a feeling at the end that the truth will not always set you free.”

Taking a drag on his cigarette, Parker adds, “It’s a dark, moody story, and the times during which it was written were dark, moody times, so there’s a lot of Jeff Parker in that book.”

Parker, who grew up in Tustin and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from UC Irvine, has come a long way from his El Mar Motel room days.

Proceeds from the book and movie sale of “Laguna Heat” allowed the former newspaper reporter and technical writer for Ford Aerospace Communication Corp. to buy his first house in Laguna Canyon, which he and Cat upgraded to their current hilltop home two years ago.

It’s a cliff-hanging, wood and glass house on stilts with a wrap-around deck that gives the couple a spectacular view of their rural surroundings. (The growth and no-growth issue plays a significant role in “Pacific Beat” and, Parker says, “that’s a heartfelt theme for me.”

Like his other two novels, “Pacific Beat” also reveals Parker’s own “profound mistrust of authority,” and a “wild strain of romanticism--the idea that romantic love can redeem and fulfill you and make you happy. Is that true or not? I don’t know. I guess I’m a romantic so I posit that it is.”

Parker is unsure of how to peg his novels, saying they’re not strictly mysteries.

“They’re a little bigger than that,” he says. “I try to bring a little more to the party than just the simple expectations of the mystery buff.”

And yet, he acknowledges, “Pacific Beat” falls more into the mystery category than “Little Saigon.”

“Really, at heart, it’s a straight who-done-it and why,” he said. “I think it’s fun to provide those kinds of thrills for readers and it’s fun to write too.”

Although Parker’s publisher, St. Martin’s Press, sent him on a 10-city tour to promote “Little Saigon” in 1988, he is doing only signings in bookstores in Los Angeles and Orange County to publicize “Pacific Beat.” “The general tenor of the ‘Pacific Beat’ release seems to be a quieter confidence in the book than ‘Little Saigon,’ ” he says.

Parker says his wife is feeling well enough that they plan to take a riverboat cruise down the Mississippi later this month. (To prepare for their vacation they have been reading the works of Mark Twain and watching tapes of the recent PBS series on the Civil War.)

Then it’s back to work for Parker.

Now that he has written about Laguna Beach, Little Saigon and Newport Beach, what’s next?

“ ‘Garden Grove Heat,’ ” he jokes.

Actually, Parker is a couple of hundred pages into his next novel, in which he again returns to Laguna Beach for much of the action.

“It’s really early to say, but I have a deep suspicion that it may be my last Orange County book for awhile,” he says. Then he grins: “I may completely change my mind when it’s done and write about Tustin.”