Sunburn Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART I

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  PART II

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  PART III

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  “Grisham and Turow remain the two best-known writers in the genre. There is, however, a third novelist at work today who deserves to be considered alongside Turow and Grisham. His name is John Lescroart.”—Chicago Sun-Times

  Praise for the Novels of John Lescroart

  Betrayal

  “Betrayal is provocative . . . a tour de force of a legal thriller . . . easily usurps the latest from Grisham and Turow.”—The Providence Journal-Bulletin

  “Lescroart dispatches courtroom scenes with crisp efficiency.”—Entertainment Weekly

  “Adrenaline-infused . . . A first-rate addition to the author’s ongoing series, this should please both long-time readers and new fans.”—Publishers Weekly

  “Extremely satisfying.”—Library Journal

  “A great read.”—Booklist

  continued…

  The Suspect

  The American Authors Association

  2007 Book of the Year

  “An intriguing puzzle. . . . Developments in Stuart’s case will keep the reader guessing until the very end.”—Richmond Times-Dispatch

  “The Suspect is one smooth ride, and a fine legal thriller to boot.”—Philadelphia Inquirer

  The Hunt Club

  “A fast-paced tale of high-society intrigue and street-savvy suspense.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “Stakeouts, fake-outs, make-outs and shoot-outs. . . . [Lescroart is] a terrific yarn spinner.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  The Motive

  “Surpasses anything Grisham ever wrote and bears comparison with Turow.”—The Washington Post

  “Unfolds like a classic Law & Order.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  The Second Chair

  “Lescroart gives his ever-growing readership another spellbinder to savor.”—Library Journal

  The First Law

  “With his latest, Lescroart again lands in the top tier of crime fiction.”—Publishers Weekly

  The Oath

  A People Page-Turner

  “A TERRIFIC CRIME STORY.”—People

  The Hearing

  “A SPINE-TINGLING LEGAL THRILLER.”

  —Larry King, USA Today

  Nothing but the Truth

  “RIVETING . . . ONE OF LESCROART’S BEST TALES YET.”—Chicago Tribune

  The Mercy Rule

  “WELL-WRITTEN, WELL-PLOTTED, WELL-DONE.” —Nelson DeMille

  Guilt

  “BEGIN GUILT OVER A WEEKEND. . . . If you start during the workweek, you will be up very, very late, and your pleasure will be tainted with, well, guilt.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

  A Certain Justice

  “A West Coast take on The Bonfire of the Vanities . . . richly satisfying.”—Kirkus Reviews

  “A gifted writer. . . . I read him with great pleasure.”—Richard North Patterson

  The 13th Juror

  “FAST-PACED . . . sustains interest to the very end.”—The Wall Street Journal

  Hard Evidence

  “ENGROSSING . . . compulsively readable, a dense and involving saga of big-city crime and punishment.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  Dead Irish

  “Full of all the things I like. Lescroart’s a pro.”

  —Jonathan Kellerman

  ALSO BY JOHN LESCROART

  A Plague of Secrets

  Betrayal

  The Suspect

  The Hunt Club

  The Motive

  The Second Chair

  The First Law

  The Hearing

  The Oath

  Nothing but the Truth

  The Mercy Rule

  Guilt

  A Certain Justice

  The 13th Juror

  Hard Evidence

  The Vig

  Dead Irish

  Rasputin’s Revenge

  Son of Holmes

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto,

  Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices:

  80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Pinnacle edition. Published by arrangement with the author.

  First Signet Printing, June 2009

  Copyright © John Lescroart, 1981

  eISBN : 978-1-101-05678-3

  All rights reserved

  The author wishes to acknowledge the right to reprint portions of “Mr. Tambourine Man” by Bob Dylan. Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  To Leslee Lescroart and to Pat Gallagher-Jones

  I would like to thank the San Francisco Foundation for its encouragement and support. For this new edition, I’d especially like to thank Barbara Sawyer, who is responsible for its resu
rrection.

  There is something bittersweet and wonderful about seeing an old, long-out-of print book re-emerge back into the light of day.

  It’s bittersweet because the person who wrote the book has changed into an entirely different being from the idealistic and ambitious young man who set out to write what he hoped would be the first book of a long literary career. My initial, naive vision of the writing life never considered the possibility of a sustained oeuvre, which has now reached the majestic total of twenty books. I thought that the way it worked was you wrote one novel so unforgettable, so true, and so sweeping that everybody in the world read it (think To Kill A Mockingbird), and then after that, you were somehow, magically, transformed into an Author for Life. Little did I realize back then that authors who made a living at this noble profession tended to write a book every year or at least every couple of years. So, since Sunburn was going to be my one shot at literary immortality, I felt I had to throw everything I had into it.

  As I first set down the blank pages next to my typewriter (yes, a typewriter—it was that long ago!), I dared for the very first time to let myself imagine that I might be creating a real book, something important that would have a life beyond my own. And if that was what it was going to be, I wouldn’t be satisfied with a pedestrian story told in the “regular” fashion. No, I’d of course first have to set it in Europe, à la Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Then I would tell the story in a sty listically intricate way—using a narrative voice in first, second, and third person. No one had ever written a book like the one I was contemplating. It was not only going to change my life—it might actually change the literary world itself. Needless to say, Sunburn did none of the above.

  Hence, bittersweet.

  Although Sunburn did win the San Francisco Foundation’s Joseph Henry Jackson Award for best as-yet unpublished novel by a California author under thirty-five, publication did not follow for another four years. And that initial publication was after the book had gathered the proverbial drawerful of rejections. Finally, when it did come out, it was as a paperback original with a cover that was misleading and tasteless at best, and semipor nographic at worst.

  So now I approach the occasion of the reissu ance of Sunburn with a mixture of joy and trepidation: joy because for a writer it is always wonderful to see one of your very early efforts have a new chance to come back into print and to reach an entirely new audience; and trepidation because the book in question is so far removed from the kind of story, and the style of writing, of the rest of my published work that a part of me halfway fears that it might disappoint my loyal readers.

  So for those readers, and also the new ones, who are now holding Sunburn in your hands, I offer you not an apologia, because I remain extremely proud of this book and believe that there is much to recommend it, but an explanation of the first stirrings of a writer’s instincts that drew me to this story in the first place.

  So what did writing this book teach me? How did it help to turn me into the writer that I am today?

  One of the conceits that accounted for my early rejections was my then-held—and long-held—belief that the act of writing was such a sacred artistic endeavor that it should flow unimpeded from the brain to the page. The idea of rewriting struck me as impure, sacrilegious. So I wrote slowly, self-consciously, forming whole sentences at a time before I would commit them like precious brushstrokes to my canvas. If a conversation failed to sustain interest, or a description fell flat, I would be tempted to let the words stand because they were natural. I thought they were more real, not realizing that “real” in fiction, as in sculpture, is an artifice. When I finished my first draft, every instinct in me wanted to call the book finished for good.

  But then I asked myself, what if it could be better? Would revision lessen the book’s power or purity? The answer, of course, though painful to admit, was no. The answer to that question is always no. The cliché is that there is no good writing; there is only good rewriting. And this is the book that taught me that. I labored and labored over the words of the second draft, removing what made me cringe, adding flashes of poetry or insight. And all of these changes made the book so much better. Still not perfect, but well on its way to readable.

  The other major problem as I set out to be a writer was that my focus was almost exclusively on character, and this in spite of the fact that I had not yet learned two crucial lessons: one, André Malraux’s dictum that character is fate, and two, that character is revealed by action. It was in the actual writing of this book that these twin pillars of fiction came to have some meaning to me. I wanted everyone to talk about ideas and to represent ideals, but I found as I tried to formulate scenes that unless the characters in them actually did something—and, more than that, something interesting or unexpected!—that there was no life, no vibrancy, no drama.

  The power of the first scene, of the very first words—“It wasn’t what you’d call a clean kill.”—introduces action as revelatory of character in a specific scene, and it’s this sense of scenes building on one another, of people interacting and revealing themselves, that drives the story forward. Story is so much more than mood, but until I put characters into action and into conflict, I had been blind to this lesson.

  As I’ve intimated here, I’ve done another small revision on this edition of Sunburn. I’ve removed a few inconsistencies, added some motivation, deleted excessive and cringe-inducing verbiage. What’s left is the best book I could write at the age of thirty, and one that taught me much of what I’ve come to know about writing.

  Now, rereading the novel myself for the first time in nearly thirty years, I was alternatively pleased by my audacity, by some flashes of verbal dexterity, by the depth of tone and the complexity of the plot itself, and chagrined by many glaring motivational failures among my characters and an embarrassing overabundance of cliché and profanity (most of both of these flaws hopefully excised in this printing). In the end, I was happily surprised not by how much revision the book needed, but by how little. The story still works. The characters are alive and real. The setting is genuine. I would be surprised if many of this book’s modern readers did not have to stifle at least a lump in the throat in the final pages. I know that I did.

  —John Lescroart

  PART I

  My weariness amazes me,

  I’m branded on my feet,

  I have no one to meet

  And the ancient, empty street’s

  too dead for dreamin’.

  —BOB DYLAN “Mr. Tambourine Man”

  One

  It wasn’t what you’d call a clean kill.

  But then, it was only meant to be theater, and judging from Kyra’s reaction, a comedy at that.

  She was sitting on the stone wall laughing, and I hurried out from the woods next to the house to see what was so funny. Her squeals drowned out the squawks from the chicken until I’d come into the courtyard.

  I noticed at the same time that she was wearing no underwear, and that the chicken was bleeding from its back, not its neck. Sean was standing over it, one leg holding down its legs, the ax in his one hand, ready to swing again. The chicken fluttered its wings madly, trying to free itself, pecking randomly, crazily, at Sean’s foot. Kyra laughed again, and I stood transfixed while he brought the ax down three more times, finally severing the head. Then he removed his foot and the body began running in its last, hopeless freedom. When it dropped, Sean looked up at his audience.

  “I told you I could.”

  “And you did. You were wonderful.”

  “Close your legs,” he said. “You’re pretty visible.”

  “You’ve got blood on your pants.” She dropped from the fence. “Here’s Douglas. Did you see him?” she asked me. “Wasn’t he splendid?”

  I walked over and picked up the chicken by its legs. “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “It’s dinner,” said Sean, no longer triumphant.

  “I gathered that, but why didn’t you let Berta kill
it, or me, or even Lea, for God’s sake. I just don’t see the point.”

  Kyra put her arm around his waist, and lifted her breasts at me. “I told him he couldn’t do it with only one hand. He’d been going on about how he could do anything anyone else can, even if he didn’t have two hands, and I bet him he couldn’t catch a chicken and cut off its head. And what are you so sore about, anyway? It’s only a chicken.”

  “I guess I don’t have the same stomach for blood that you do,” I said, and walked into the house, holding the limp and bloodless bird.

  The vacation had been Lea’s idea, and at first it had seemed like a good one. We’d been stagnating at our work for a year or more, and it had been time to get over the inertia and move anywhere, so we had decided to visit her brother in Spain. He lived out behind the little town of Tossa de Mar, which is about halfway to France along the coast from Barcelona, and it had seemed far enough away to make it a real change.

  Her brother, Sean Mallory, had bought the house about a year after his accident. The insurance company had paid him a fortune for losing his hand in a press, and he decided to see something of the world with his newfound riches. He’d only gotten as far as Spain before he decided he’d found paradise, and he’d bought this house and settled down. Since then, we’d received letters about once a month extolling the wonder of Ibe ria, and they’d sold us on going over.

  Now he spent his time trying to write novels. He was, for the most part, an entertaining and generous host who left us alone when we wanted to be. Occasionally, he’d become intolerable and yell at everyone in the manner of someone who’s grown used to getting his own way, but it would always pass quickly, and it seemed a small price to pay for an otherwise idyllic Spanish vacation.