High Flying in The Fallen

I don't know how I failed to hear about this novel. Maybe I'm the last one on the block to do so, but it's been four years since T. Jefferson Parker's The Fallen was published. This detective novel involves the murder of an investigator for San Diego's "Ethics Authority," who falls from the sixth story of a hotel (must have been at a COGEL conference).

The investigator is said to know all the "players" in San Diego's biggest industries. His mission is described as "to keep [the private sector] from getting too chummy with the various branches of the city bureaucracy." In other words, mission impossible, not to mention highly improbable.

The novel has great lines like "Ethics does its best work when people have just enough rope to hang themselves." And "I began to wonder if his murder was really connected to sex videos, Squeaky Clean girls, municipal-bond ratings, and corrupt city employees."

Questions asked include, "Why would an Ethics Authority investigator rent a Testarossa at four-fifty a night?" For those who, like me, don't know what a Testarossa is, it's a Ferrari that went out of production in 1996 and sold for over $200,000 back then. Just the sort of car every EC staff member dreams of driving.

The Ethics Authority director answers the question, "An occasional expense for cultivating his sources [and] to foster an impression of corruptibility." In fact, investigators are even allowed to lure people into illegal conduct. Oh, those naughty, high-flying EC staff!

The Fallen comes in cloth, paper, e-book, and audio formats. Please add your review in the comments section if you've read it.

Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics

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