The Jaguar (Charlie Hood)

An excellent author...so many wonderful books....this isn't one of them......if you judge his writing on this offering you will miss a lot of fine reading.

Parker's writings have dwindled to the point of absurdity. They no longer are thrilling, exciting, and have no climax, except stringing the unsupecting reader along to buy the next book. Forget it and I own them all. Mike Finnegan may be the "devil" and Bradley Jones his disciple, end it already.....this is not "War and Peace" that goes on forever. I understand the fixation with the female rock singer....but it's time to let go.

Kill off the bad guys and move on to real drama. The Jaguar is slightly better than the previous two, but his writing is stuck in the past and needs to move on to new characters and exciting conlusions.

I cannot understand how anyone other than friends would ever consider this "good writing". Erin is obiviously a tribute to Parker's first wife, who passed away many years ago. I knew her and she was a wonderful person, but please move on and return to the writing that made you a pleasure to read. I own all of his novels, but will no longer waste time or money on the saga of Mike, Bradley and Charlie Hood.

Contrary to the last sentence in the book's product description, this--and the last few of Parker's books--is not a battle of good and evil....it is a battle between charcaters who are mostly all evil. Bradley--the real main character, not Charlie Hood--is a sociopath and has been the main cause of his own troubles from his earliest incarnation. Charlie Hood is not really the "hero" of the book but is more Bradley's enabler....and not a very interesting one at that. While the scenes of violence may well be based on fact, they seem written more for the author's enjoyment in shocking his readers than for their narrative value.

These problems are compounded by Parker's seeming obession with what might me termed "magical mystery"...that is the continued references to the bandit Murrieta and the "ghostly" character of Mike Finnegan....These attempts are better suited to vampire stories (Anne Rice anyone?) than to driving forward the story to be told. The "magical" help that this and other characters provide really take this book out of the realm of pausible mystery.

I have read and purchased everyone of Parker's novels begining with his earlist books about Little Saigon and Orange County California. No more.....these last books have been way off the mark

The Charlie Hood series started off with such promise in "L.A. Outlaws". "The Renegades" managed to maintain that promise. The next two books were OK but there was most definitely some slippage happening; not enough to scare me away though. With this effort, however, I'm not sure I'll have the courage to invest another day or two of my life experiencing a once promising writer going completely off the rails. Let me finish this brief critique by saying, if you have something--anything--better to do than read this book, by all means, do it. You will not regret missing this trifle.

This is the most interesting series going at the moment - I hate having to wait a year for the next episode. I am not sure there s ever going to be a solution to the puzzle. For anyone thinking about buying this it is worthwhile buying all four books. The real value is the exploration of the border gun and drug issues. This one isnt quite as good as the previous one - mostly because the main characters are a little too flat, drug lord and son and evil cohorts- but it is still very good and the pursuit and exploration of of the Mike character is spellbinding.

This is the latest in a serial of Parker novels. Its flashbacks are pointless unless one has read the predecessors. The protagonists are not credible. Bradley is a sociopathic, thoroughly corrupt young cop who devotedly loves his wife, Erin. Erin is an acoustic pop musician, pure as driven snow, pregnant, kidnapped by a narco. Charlie Hood is a fireplug cop, pissed on by others, who is oddly devoted to his duty to Bradley while in pursuit of a higher goal. The rest of the cast, and the plot, are even more bizarre.
I am done with Mr. Parker.

I was looking forward to reading T. Jefferson Parker's book, The Jaguar. I find myself reading it because I purchased it, not because it is as good a read as others of his books. The language he uses, the way his characters speak and think are rather juvenile, plodding, rough and boring. I will finish it to see if I learn anything new about the cartels, Mexico, L.A., etcetera. Then I will donate the book - not a keeper.

This is a terrible book and demonstrates what is wrong (troubling) with the literary/publishing industry. It's not that the author, T. Jefferson Parker, can't write a coherent sentence (he can), or describe scenes (he can), or describe people (he can) - it's that there is no reason demonstrated in this book why he should - other than to make money for himself and the Industry, which is not the reason I, and most people, read. I read for several reasons: 1) To be informed - about people, history, geography, animals, industry, etc. 2) To be assuaged of loneliness. 3) To escape 4) To have my curiosity piqued. This book did none of those. The story, the setting, and the characters, are all unbelievable and uninteresting, made even more so by the fact that this is a serial character and genre driven book (contemporary crime fiction with a Southern California based ATF agent as "main" protagonist); and if you aren't familiar with the previous books - it's even more stupid. The characters, all of them, lack personality. The plot is deranged. The setting a fabrication. The title is almost unrelated. And the ending is predictable. I hate to be a hater - but I hate everything about this book and what it represents - a waste of time at best, and at worst, theft. T. Jefferson Parker should be ashamed of himself, and so should everyone else involved with the publication of The Jaguar. I've read several TJP books, and enjoyed them, but I won't ever again read anything he writes! I'm done. I feel insulted and betrayed.

T. Jefferson Parker is as fine a writer of the crime thriller/suspense genre that we have out there today. His work is consistently challenging and usually very rewarding for his loyal readers. His great strength is his abilty to develop characters that are so fully fleshed that readers feel they "know" them. Equally powerful, are his spot-on descriptions of Southern California and the Mexican Border regions that allow readers to "see" them through his words. The rhythms and flow of Parker's stylings are so contagious that before readers know it, time has melted away and they are 100 pages into the book--always a wonderful sign of an addicting writer.

"The Jaguar" is the fifth in the Charlie Hood saga and not particularly one of the best. While I am not a big fan of Charlie Hood as a Parker protagonist, his stories continue to be suspenseful and imminently readable due to Parker's wonderful pacing and stylings. There is a soap opera quality to the Charle Hood series that, at times, demotivates the reader and seems to consciously string the reader along to buy the next installment due to untied details and loose ends. Each new effort leaves unanswered questions and untied details surrounding Bradley Jones, son of his former lover, and currently a sheriff's deputy who moonlights as a mule for a Mexican drug cartel and who usually mucks up Hood's efforts to protect Erin McKenna, Jones's songstress wife. And the enigmatic and dangerous Mike Finnegan appears and reappears often enough to infuriate the reader with his mysterious and clearly evil plans. The good news is that Parker has one more Charlie Hood novel planned that should finally tie up the whole Hood/Mckenna/Jones/Finnegan soap opera.

As in "The Border Lords", Hood functions as a lesser presence in "The Jaguar"; indeed, he is absent from 50% of the action, even though a significant part of the plot falls on his shoulders. Erin is kidnapped by Benjamin Armenta, ruthless and deadly head of the Gulf Cartel, and imprisoned in his deteriorating "castle" deep in the Mexican jungle under the threat of a terrible death. Armenta wants to punish Bradley for his support of one of the other deadly Cartels trying to gain control of the Southern California drug market and he also wants Erin to write the world's greatest "narcocoriddo" song portraying his life story. Bradley is forced to join forces with Hood to both deliver the ransom while at the same time, attempting to rescue her. Adding flavor to the mix is a strange priest with a sociopathic bent, Saturnino, Armenta's deranged son who desires to rape and kill Erin, and Owens Finnegan, mysterious associate of Mike Finnegan.

My only quibbles to this worthy effort are the continuing aforementioned soap operish elements, a few unexplained escapes and linkups, and an ongoing dialogue pattern between Erin and her captor that never rang really true or intense enough for this reviewer. But Parker is such a master at his craft that these minor concerns are easily forgotton within the total context of his gripping writing.

Did you ever have difficulty in getting through a book, or can't wait until it ends? That's how I felt about this book. What a disappointment. The plots were weak & somewhat boring. In my opinion, there was way too much text describing scenes & settings (a lot of boring details) but not enough on the plots themselves. I was very disappointed in the endng; very weak. I was hoping that 1 or 2 characters would be killed-off in this book, but we may have to wait for a subsequent Charle Hood book to reach some closure. Finally, I recommend that new readers of the Charlie Hood series do not read this book first; you may be confused. The plots in this book, I believe, are dependent on things that happened in previous Charlie Hood stories.