'The Renegades' by T. Jefferson Parker

Book One, last year's "L.A. Outlaws," was, as its title suggests, devoted to the lawbreakers, chief among them a good-bad antiheroine, Suzanne Jones, a charismatic eighth-grade history teacher and mother of three who transforms herself by night into a dashing feminist version of her ancestor, the 19th century California outlaw Joaquin Murrieta.

Under her nom-de-crime, Allison Murrieta, she's unquestionably the star of the novel but not its protagonist. That would be the less dazzling, freshly badged, dedicated Deputy Sheriff Charlie Hood, who, in the course of pursuing Allison, falls under her spell.

Since their noir romance ends on a definite down note, it seemed safe to assume that the novel, like most of the author's oeuvre, was a self-contained work.

But now, as if to flout that assumption, Deputy Charlie Hood has returned alone and adrift in Antelope Valley, bemoaning his lost love while prowling the high desert, a location that allows Parker to make the observation, "There were no antelope in the Antelope Valley until the twentieth century, when some were released so the valley could live up to its name, a California thing, to dream big and fill in the details later." That perfectly constructed sentence, clever enough to make other writers gnash their teeth in admiration, is what you get with Parker, along with deft characterization and hard-boiled action played out against smartly detailed Southern California landscapes.

This time the emphasis is on lawmen -- the good, the bad and the ugly. Hood is one of the good, of course, "a man of the present, used to following his heart, which had gotten him mixed results." An example of the bad would be his short-lived partner, Terry Laws, a well-liked deputy whose murder in the opening chapter prompts Hood to join Internal Affairs to investigate the secrets that may have led to his death. Laws' former partner, Reserve Deputy Coleman Draper, is definitely the ugly: a cool sociopath, who (in the novel's only sections told in first person, present tense) brags of committing several murders and beatings that he deemed necessary to maintain a lucrative weekend job of transporting tons of cocaine cash to a brutal drug lord in Mexico.