Books

The Dawn Patrol
By Don Winslow, Knopf, 2008, 303 pp.

At the beginning of Don Winslow's new novel, an undersea earthquake near the Aleutian Islands is sending "one big honking disturbance" toward Pacific Beach.

"At its most benign, a big beautiful swell to ride; at its most malevolent, a mass-murdering tsunami."

There's another disturbance building in San Diego itself, a murder causing waves as unpredictable as those making their way to the San Diego coast.

At the middle of both is one man.

Surfing is Boone Daniels' life. Early each day he is in the surf with the other members of The Dawn Patrol: Hang Twelve, Dave the Love God, Johnny Banzai, High Tide, and Sunny Day. But there's more to each of the patrol than their names.

The power of The Dawn Patrol lies in its going beneath the surface of its characters. For some there's a dark underbelly; most are buoyed by an admirable moral system, one that is at odds with the corrupt world around them.

Boone, for example, is a 30-ish surfer and a former member of the San Diego police force, a man who remains haunted by an unsolved case involving a kidnapped child. He is placed in the hands of Petra Hall, an ambitious British-born lawyer anxious to make partner in the law firm that hires Boone; she's also a woman whose ambition hides a winning vulnerability.

They become enmeshed in a web of corruption involving human trafficking, a dead stripper, a plastic surgeon whose values are not what they seem, and the strawberry fields of a former World War II Japanese-American detainee.

By the end of the book, all of this coalesces in a breathtaking climax that seamlessly cross-cuts between the disturbances at sea and the disturbances on land.

The Dawn Patrol is infused with the great good humor of Donald Westlake, without the condescension of Carl Hiassen. It channels in equal measure the social concerns of Andrew Vachss and Richard Price, while providing a cultural history of West Coast surfing and a social history of Winslow's beloved San Diego.

It is also an uncompromising novel about a world where corruption is too often the norm, a world where, while some people surf at dawn for the simple pleasures of conquering epic waves, others cross strawberry fields for pleasures nefarious and vile. Don Winslow captures that dichotomy in this deeply affecting novel of personal redemption.

By turns wickedly funny and shatteringly honest, The Dawn Patrol is not the beach read it's being touted as; it is simply one of the best contemporary novels to be found this summer.

Steven Whitton is a professor of English at Jacksonville State University.