Ultimately, however, California Girl isn't just about Janelle Vonn or the investigation of her death. It is also about her life, and about the lives of the three Becker boys who each in their own way are transformed in the aftermath of her murder. It's also about growing up, about accepting compromises, dealing with consequences, facing failure, and the entire shifting landscape of the 1960s culture (and the counter-culture). Parker's strengths lie in his deft atmospheric touches and his emphasis on his characters: his stories are rarely straightforward mysteries, and instead delve into many other interpersonal aspects than you might expect.

Nick, David, and Andy each face personal and professional crises as the investigation progresses. David may be concealing some sort of connection with Janelle that he doesn't want publicized, while Nick's affair with a secretary in the sheriff's office may come back to haunt him and Andy's ideal of publishing "the truth" may end up conflicting with his ambition and the question of compromising to protect others. Parker manages to establish each of these men as a disparate character, each still tied to the California orange groves of their youth and at a loss to explain the shifting world around them. As Nick says when the story opens:

I drove past the old SunBlesst packinghouse today. Nothing left of it. Not one stick. Now there's a bedroom store, a pet emporium, and a supermarket. Big and new. Moms and dads and kids everywhere. Pretty people, especially the moms. Young, with time to dream, wake up, and dream again.

I still have a piece of flooring I tore off the SunBlesst packinghouse back in sixty-eight. When I was young. When I thought what had happened there shouldn't ever happen anywhere. When I thought it was up to me to put things right.

I'm made of that place - of the old wood and the rusted conveyors and the pigeons in the eaves and the sunlight slanting through the cracks. Of Janelle Vonn. Of everything that went down, there in October, 1968. Even made of the wind that blew that month, dry and hot off the desert, huffing across Orange County to the sea.

One interesting device Parker uses is to frame his story in the "here and now," with first person narration by Nick. The rest of the tale is told in third person, and begins with the "rumble" in 1954 between the Beckers and the Vonns over a baseball cap casually tossed to a German shepherd. It then fast-forwards through time, following the Beckers as they intersect with Janelle until the night Nick and Andy stand over her headless corpse in a dilapidated warehouse and realize, if only slightly, that the world will never be the same again. His framing device, of course, hammers home one immediate realization, spoken by Andy in the opening chapter as he and Nick meet for lunch in the present day: "Everything we thought about Janelle Vonn was wrong."