He’s come to Los Angeles to find his mother, Laila, who moved across the country while Ren was imprisoned. He’s recently been released from juvenile detention in New York, where he was doing time for killing a man when he was 12.

Soon after, young Ren makes his appearance. The first character we’re introduced to is Tony, a dissatisfied attorney he and his social-climbing wife “have a tenuous grip on the city’s glamour.” Tony is stuck in traffic on the 101 when he sees the naked man run by, and, for reasons he has trouble articulating, gets out of his car and chases after him. Pochoda’s novel goes back and forth in time, alternating between 20, when the naked man sets out on his unusual marathon. Pochoda has a real gift for pacing, and she’s a remarkably psychologically astute writer. It’s a dizzying, kaleidoscopic thriller that refuses to let readers look away from the dark side of Southern California. “Wonder Valley” follows several people on the edge, most paying in some way for poor decisions they’ve made, whose lives intersect in surprising and at times terrifying ways. Things get even weirder, and much darker, from there. The police are unable to catch him, but one observer surmises that his freedom is likely short-lived: “Because no one can vanish for good. And the man happens to be completely naked. It’s also not immediately clear who, if anyone, is in pursuit of him. For one thing, it’s not a car speeding down the freeway, it’s a young man on foot. “Wonder Valley,” the third novel from author Ivy Pochoda, begins with a classic Los Angeles tableau: a chase on the 101, complete with a police helicopter, camera-toting news crews and spectators recording the spectacle on their smartphones.īut this chase is different.

Wonder valley book