T. Jefferson Parker

A USA Today Best of 2022, and a Los Angeles Times Bestseller!

A Thousand Steps is a beguiling thriller, an incisive coming-of-age story, and a vivid portrait of a turbulent time and place by three-time Edgar Award winner and New York Times bestselling author T. Jefferson Parker.
Laguna Beach, California, 1968. The Age of Aquarius is in full swing. Timothy Leary is a rock star. LSD is God.

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A beguiling story of an adventurous traveler, from the Edgar Award-winning author of the bestselling Deputy Charlie Hood series.
Fresh out of college, a young man is hired by a high-end travel agency. His fears that he might be in over his head prove to be well-founded when he is dispatched to a potential new destination, Playa Amazonia. Twenty hours of traveling leads him to a luxurious hotel, the world's most beautiful beach—and an encounter...

"On a dusty highway just north of the United States/Mexico border, a man named Mike Finnegan is struck by a fast-moving vehicle and flung into the desert. Miraculously, he survives and winds up in a hospital in the tiny border town of Buenavista, seemingly in full possession of his faculties including the eerie ability to understand events happening well outside the view from his hospital bed. Charlie Hood joins a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms...

When hired by a beautiful and enigmatic woman to find her missing younger sister, private investigator Roland Ford immediately senses that the case is not what it seems. He is soon swept up in a web of lies and secrets as he searches for the teenager, and even his new client cannot be trusted. His investigation leads him to a secretive charter school, skinhead thugs, a cadre of American Nazis hidden in a desert compound, an arch-conservative celebrity...

Returning hero and private investigator Roland Ford is on the trail of a mysterious killer who is beheading CIA drone operators and leaving puzzling clues at each crime scene. His troubled friend Lindsay Rakes is afraid for her own life and the life of her son after a fellow flight crew member is killed in brutal fashion. Even more terrifying is the odd note the killer left behind: "Welcome to Caliphornia. This is not the last." Ford strikes an uneasy...

"Laguna Beach, California, 1968. The Age of Aquarius is in full swing. Timothy Leary is a rock star. LSD is God. Folks from all over are flocking to Laguna, seeking peace, love, and enlightenment. Matt Antony is just trying get by. Matt is sixteen, broke, and never sure where his next meal is coming from. Mom's a stoner, his deadbeat dad is a no-show, his brother's fighting in Nam... and his big sister Jazz has just gone missing. The cops figure she's...

Bradley Jones, a deputy in the L.A. sheriff's department who's been transporting drugs for a Mexican cartel since he was 17, turns to fellow deputy Hood for help after henchmen of a rival cartel kidnap Jones's pregnant wife, Erin. If Jones doesn't pay the rival cartel's leader, Benjamin Armenta, a million within 10 days as an apology for the trouble he's caused Armenta, Armenta will have Erin skinned alive.

Charlie Hood struggles with the moral challenges of arresting his late love's cartel-connected son, Bradley Jones, while the enigmatic Mike Finnegan uses his unsettling knowledge to infiltrate both of their lives.

Charlie Hood must determine if ATF undercover agent Sean "Oz" Ozburn--deep undercover supporting the "sicarios" of the Baja Cartel--has suffered a permanent break with his mission and his moral compass--or if he has his reasons for going "completely dark."

This time around, Hood is running the California-Mexico border with the ATF, searching for the iron river, the massive and illegal flow of handguns and automatic weapons that fuels the bloody cartel wars south of the border. Gunrunners by nature aren't exactly ethical, but the lengths they'll go to, and the innocent lives they'll risk, are shocking even to Hood. Most shocking of all is the close personal connection Hood finds wrapped up in events...