The thrill is on

It's been nine years since the publication of his first edgy, neo-noirish thriller, The Horse Latitudes, but Kirkland author Robert Ferrigno is finally, definitely, provably playing with the Big Boys. Better-known American crime novelists such as Michael Connelly and James Ellroy now supply gushy blurbs for his book jackets. His novels (so consistently published just on the cusp of summer) feature prominently in lists of quintessential beach fare. And legendary New York editor Sonny Mehta has started to handle his work.

Heartbreaker
by Robert Ferrigno (Pantheon, $24)

"It was amazing," says the 52-year-old Ferrigno (pronounced fur-REEN-yo), leaning forward excitedly in his chair at downtown Kirkland's Triple-J Caf頲ecently. "I'd done four novels for two different publishers before signing to do Heartbreaker [for Pantheon Books]. I thought I knew what a best-selling thriller was supposed to be like, what sorts of things you needed to do with plot and characters to make it work. So the first version of this new book had a bunch of things in it—action scenes—that were meant to advance the plot. And I remember having this conversation with Sonny, during which I was explaining all of this—and he looked at me like I was insane. He said, 'I have no preconceived notions of the book you're supposed to write.' He said, 'Don't do anything that you think you're supposed to do, just write what you want to write.'

"I was suddenly giddy," Ferrigno recalls. "I had tears in my eyes 'cuz I was so happy. I was already rewriting parts of the book in my head. A lot of things I had considered doing, I'd censored out because I thought they would distract from my basic plot. And now I realized that I could put them back in. So I told Sonny that I already knew what I was going to do, and that I'd get the manuscript back to him in five weeks." He laughs. "Well, it was more like five months, and I worked my ass off. But what a time! I felt so liberated. I couldn't wait to get to work writing every morning, just to see how my story was going to [turn out]."

Heartbreaker unfolds in the smart, cinematic fashion to which Ferrigno fans have become accustomed. The story revolves around an ex-undercover cop named Valentine Duran, who flees the drugs-and-thugs culture of Miami after a white-trash narcotics kingpin named Junior Mayfield has Val's friend and partner murdered—while Val is forced to watch through a telescope. After first killing the guys who capped his buddy, Val picks up his cigar-chewing grandmother and hightails it across the country to Los Angeles. He goes to work as a technical advisor on "ultra-low-budget action movies," yet can't resist taunting Junior with his freedom, appearing as a contestant on Jeopardy, Junior's favorite TV show. ("Junior taped every episode of Jeopardy," Ferrigno writes. "Half the dope dealers in south Florida were glued to the tube every afternoon, making bets, yelling at the contestants. Junior once shot out a 47-inch Mitsubishi over a missed answer.")

Val figures he's safe in Southern California. At least until he falls fast and hard for Kyle Abbott, a seductive, dark-haired marine biologist from a wealthy but terminally dysfunctional Laguna Beach family. As their romance develops, so does a scheme by Kyle's wastrel-ish stepbrother, Charles "Kilo" Abbott III, to do away with his stepmother, the person who stands in the way of Kilo inheriting his father's money. Assisting Kilo in this crime are two of Ferrigno's signature baddies: a remorseless redhead, Jackie Hendricks, and her deranged Gulf Warveteran cohort Dekker. Val soon finds himself caught up in the Abbott clan's deaths and duplicities, while simultaneously endeavoring to steer clear of Junior, who, accompanied by an overdressed Colombian sociopath, has decided to pay a vengeful call on Val in LA.

Ferrigno, who grew up in Fort Lauderdale and spent part of his career writing feature columns for a newspaper in Orange County, California, brings just the right verisimilitude to both settings in Heartbreaker, both the ambition and sexual release of SoCal and the "sultry indolence" of the Sunshine State. There's a particularly interesting scene about halfway through the book (and based on one of Ferrigno's own childhood memories) in which Val recollects growing up with mosquitoes: "Florida state disease-control trucks had regularly rumbled through his neighborhood laying down thick white clouds of DDT when the skeeters got too bad—he and Steffano had ridden their bicycles behind the truck, playing in the fog, pretending they were fighter pilots lost in the clouds."

His taste for dialogue that combines humor with menace suggests Ferrigno's debt to novelist Elmore Leonard. But some of his cultural insights and turns of phrase demonstrate more Ferrigno's maturity and increasing self-confidence as an author than they do outside influences. For example, he describes a rumpled sheriff's detective as having "the cop walk, a slow, fatigued swagger, knowing he had the force of authority behind him but too overworked to flaunt himself. A cop could walk into a brick wall and be surprised that the wall didn't step aside." Elsewhere, Ferrigno adds to our image of femme fatales with this memorable description of Jackie Hendricks: "There was a radiant wickedness to her, a cruelty as consuming and impersonal as a forest fire—Kilo saw flames in her eyes and longed to throw himself in."