ART JEFFERSON

       Art Jefferson is an agent with the FBI.
       He is a cop, not a spy. He is proud to be a Federal one but he is first and only a cop. He has been in service for over a quarter century earning a tremendous amount of respect and a fair number of commendations, all doing what a cop does best which is hunt down bad guys and bring them in. There is not one bit of interest in this 50+-year old man that wants anything at all like the covert world of cloaks and daggers.
       Unfortunately, when your Federal beat is the second largest city in the United States and terrorists and international criminals and just plain kooks who have no care about borders and jurisdictions all decide to play their games on your turf, you start learning about the other law enforcements besides the Bureau and the LAPD. You get to know agents from the State Department, the CIA, DIA, NSA, and more. That would be bad enough but all of these inevitably have some officious s.o.b. who thinks he can tell you how to do your job better than you already know how. That's when diplomacy and tact play such a major role.
       Which is a shame because Jefferson has no interest in that. He is not obnoxious. He is not insulting. He is not in-your-face get-out-of-mine. He is usually calm about such matters. And then he goes and does things his way and that usually works out for the better.
       Jefferson is a tall, broad-shouldered black man who was raised by his grandmother in Alabama before being allowed at too young an age to see the sights of Vietnam. He survived that, came home, went to college, and then found a home with the FBI. Many different cities and a lot of different cases and he was eventually posted to LA. He was definitely making it his turf, knowing a good number of the players on both sides of the law when a heart attack took him down. Desk duty followed, along with doctors telling him to lose 25+ pounds and watch his blood pressure. Running was not easy, either, with his lungs not working like they should.
       But Jefferson was not meant to ride a desk. He hated it. He fought it. And he finally got back out onto the streets. And that is when the problems from the other parts of the world mentioned earlier started showing up.

       The four recorded adventures of Jefferson are by no means just about him. They are ensemble pieces where the actions of many different players from the bad guys all the way up, sometimes, to the White House are told. But eventually it always comes back, as the saying goes, to the "boots on the ground" and those boots are filled by Jefferson. It is he that the bad guys shoot their bullets at or try to blow up or run over.
       Luckily for Jefferson that he has the help of Francine ("don't call me that") Aguirre, a fellow agent albeit a lot younger who uncovers important information in the first case and is promoted to his partner as the series goes on. Having Frankie around to watch your back has proven very fortuitous for Jefferson. It is a shame she has to watch him eat the kind of things he does.

       The Art Jefferson series is a very interesting one for unlike just about every other series, it is a mixture of a solo hero and a group effort. Jefferson is often alone or helped by one person, luckily it is the terrific Frankie, but even as we follow this hero and partner, we also are taken to a whole different world where we watch the big boys play their games (often unwell) and the bad guys scheme and plot. Truth be told, it is I who marked these books as the Art Jefferson series, not the author nor the publisher. Still, I stand with my decision. Art Jefferson is, imho, the main character in the books and the one I most enjoyed following. Whatever else was going on, I looked forward to the story coming back to Jefferson.