A Thousand Steps

Matt Anthony, a high-schooler in 1960s San Francisco, has the weight of the world on his skinny shoulders. His conservative father abandoned the family and writes only to rail about the “queers and communists” who have taken over the city. Matt supports his family with a punishing paper route while living off fish he catches and foraging restaurant leftovers, all because his mother claims to have a curiously long-lasting flu but is actually using their grocery and rent money on drugs. Worst of all, right after Matt sees a teen girl’s body washed up on the beach, his sister Jasmine goes missing. Matt’s mother doesn’t take Jasmine’s disappearance seriously for days and the police are little help, leaving Matt to investigate the seedy human infrastructure of the city’s drug scene, which wears a veneer of peace and love but underneath is cut-throat capitalist. Matt’s story is akin to an ancient epic that sees the hero tested and battered (his lengthy skirmish with a giant fish—two week’s worth of food for a hungry boy—is terrifying). But ultimately he triumphs as he fights for what’s right. The prolific Parker has 27 other novels to back this up, most recently Then She Vanished (2020); readers who like a modern epic should turn to Michael Hughes’s Country, a version of The Iliad set in present-day Northern Ireland.