In ‘Later Days,’ Chip Jacobs draws on Pasadena and La Cañada Flintridge’s past

Not a few novels set in Southern California feel local to natives and longtime residents. They try, and sometimes succeed, to capture the feeling of “L.A.” ( “The Big Sleep,” “Play It as It Lays” ). Other novels are what city editors used to call “local-local” stories – Naomi Hirahara ’s “Summer of the Big Bachi” set in Altadena and other Japanese American neighborhoods of the Southland, Kem Nunn’s surf-noir “Huntington Beach.”

But in his second novel set in Pasadena and adjacent La Cañada Flintridge, Pasadena author Chip Jacobs goes what newsroom sages called “local-local-local” – there and (almost) only there, deep in the weeds of one particular small part of our neck of the woods.

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