I read this back when it was originally published in 1991, and I remember thinking, “Wow! This is a comic that combines the best of Marvel’s more grouI read this back when it was originally published in 1991, and I remember thinking, “Wow! This is a comic that combines the best of Marvel’s more grounded heroes with its cosmic elements to create an epic story of a threat to the entire universe. Someday, maybe in about 20 or 25 years when motion picture technology advances to the point where they can make superhero movies that look really cool, Marvel could start their own movie studio and release a series of films based on some of these characters. Then they could use the Infinity Stones as the primary connective tissue that links all those films together.
After capitalizing on that for movie after movie and making piles of money, the whole thing can climax with a version of this story. Like maybe it could be an Avengers movie called The Infinity War or something like that. That’s a pretty big story for just one film. Maybe two movies tied together? Yeah, that sounds better. And I’m thinking they'd be ready to do that in…let’s say 2018 or so.”
After enjoying the latest version of the Daredevil story with Netflix's new series it seemed like a good time to revisit this 1993 origin reboot that After enjoying the latest version of the Daredevil story with Netflix's new series it seemed like a good time to revisit this 1993 origin reboot that Frank Miller did for the character. It holds up fairly well although this story is more concerned with expanding the old story rather than making any changes to it. Miller avoids hitting on the major events of DD's life in order to focus on detailing the time between the accident that blinded young Matt Murdock to the first time he puts on a mask to take on criminals as a vigilante.
My big complaint is the art because I'm not a fan of John Romita Jr. who draws everyone so square and blocky that they could be Lego figures. And it isn't really fair to compare a 22 year old comic to a modern TV show, but the Kingpin here seems really one-note and cartoonish compared to the Netflix version. At least he doesn't discipline anyone with a car door here though....more
Damn, but this book exhausted me. It wasn’t just having to hold up it’s 127 lbs. of bulk while trying to read that wore me out either.
Stephenson hasn’Damn, but this book exhausted me. It wasn’t just having to hold up it’s 127 lbs. of bulk while trying to read that wore me out either.
Stephenson hasn’t made it easy on his fans since Cryptonomicon in 1999 with it and every book since being about 27,000 pages long while spanning the late 1600s in Europe to World War II to another world complete with it’s own languages and customs, and each book was also crammed with detailed information about topics like finance and code breaking. When I saw that this was going to be a modern day thriller that had something to do with a MMORPG, I thought Neal was finally taking pity on us poor readers of only average intelligence and attention span and giving us an easier book.
Wrong.
At over 1000 pages with a plot that races around the world and includes multiple characters in wildly different circumstances, Reamde is not a thriller you just breeze through, but like most things Stephenson, I found that the effort I put into it was rewarded with a wild and unique story and top notch writing.
Richard Forthrast fled the US for Canada to avoid the draft during Vietnam and once the war was over he made a small fortune as a marijuana smuggler. Years later, Richard put his pot money into the development of a MMORPG called T’Rain and is now enormously wealthy and successful as the game is one of the most popular of its type around the world.
Richard’s relationship with his family in Iowa is strained, but he loves his niece, Zula. An African refugee, Zula was adopted by Richard’s brother and grew up as an Iowa farm girl and recently graduated college with a computer degree. Richard offers her a job and is thrilled that he’ll get to spend more time with her. However, hackers have put a virus called Reamde in the T’Rain game and this inadvertently begins a chain of events with deadly consequences.
The story roams from the US to the Isle of Man to Canada and China as well as various other locales and a huge cast of characters is involved. Russian gangsters, fantasy novelists, British spies, on-line gamers, a Hungarian money launderer, Chinese hackers, American survivalist nut jobs and Islamic terrorists all get mixed up in the plot, and the book culminates in an epic way with 100+ tense pages that stressed me out and left me needing a nap afterwards.
While Stephenson still never met an info dump he didn’t like, he keeps the focus here mainly on the characters without taking long detours to explore concepts like he has in some of his other books although he does spend a fair amount of time explaining the nature of the T‘Rain game while working in some pretty funny observations about the fantasy genre and gaming. Fans of his earlier work who grumble about the length and pace of his later stuff will still find plenty to bitch about here, and there are some dead sub-plots that could be trimmed with no damage done to the overall story.
But to me, that’s what makes a Neal Stephenson book special. Yes, he probably could have written a 300 to 400 page book that got most of the same plot into it, but without the backstories and the time spent in the mind of each character as they think through their respective situations, it’d be just another book with a bunch of people running around with guns and laptops. Part of the charm for me is Stephenson’s quirky way of telling a story, and he’s delivered another great book here....more
There’s not enough ‘W’s in the world to convey the ‘EWWWWWWWWWW!!’ factor of this book.
In Homestead, Minnesota, a young man just out of high school wThere’s not enough ‘W’s in the world to convey the ‘EWWWWWWWWWW!!’ factor of this book.
In Homestead, Minnesota, a young man just out of high school with a bright future brutally murders a farmer and tries to make it look like an accident. However, his crime is discovered, and he’s found dead in his cell before he can explain why he did it. The boy's death looks fishy, and the chief suspect is a deputy that the new female sheriff just defeated in an election for the job so that’s a political shitstorm just waiting to happen. The sheriff comes to Virgil Flowers (a/k/a ‘that fucking Flowers'), agent of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, for assistance. When Virgil starts digging into the case he finds some very shocking secrets and more than one person willing to kill to keep them.
John Sandford delivers once again. Virgil is a spin-off character from Sandford’s Prey-series featuring Lucas Davenport, and while I’ve always liked this character, I hadn’t found any of the Virgil-based books quite as entertaining as the Davenport ones until now. There’s an intriguing mystery followed by some twisted revelations and then a series of intense and exciting action scenes. This was one bad-ass crime thriller.
Virgil has always been fun reading as the outdoorsy ladies man who favors vintage rock band t-shirts and sometimes forgets his gun in his truck, but he's turning into a more fully formed character instead of just a collection of traits. Now I can’t wait until we see Virgil again instead of just thinking of him as an entertaining placeholder between Davenport novels.
Random Thoughts
* Davenport is starting to be a bad influence on Virgil because he does some highly illegal breaking-and-entering in this one, and he comes up with an elaborate scheme that puts a civilian in danger to flush out some of the bad guys. Those are some classic Davenport moves.
* I continue to love the interactions between Davenport and Virgil, especially the way that Davenport’s more ruthless political side comes out when he’s giving Virgil his marching orders.
* Virgil’s background as a minister’s son comes in handy when he gets to drop some serious Bible-knowledge on folks.
* After 30 books, you’d think that Sandford would start to seem repetitive when it comes to describing brutal Minnesota winters, but he can still make me feel the wind chill.
* Sneaky Virgil pulls a nice small-town trick by talking about the investigation openly in a diner. Before long, he’s drawing crowds who are anxious to hear the gossip, but he gets a lot of information and goodwill in return. Plus, he gets to stir up public opinion in a way that is beneficial to his investigation.
* Again, just let me say, “EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!” ...more
There’s a whole lot of people writing ‘serious’ crime fiction books who don’t do it half as well as Brubaker and Phillips do in this this comic book.
AThere’s a whole lot of people writing ‘serious’ crime fiction books who don’t do it half as well as Brubaker and Phillips do in this this comic book.
As the title indicates, the main character Leo is a criminal and a coward. He’s a pickpocket who used to plan robberies despite his reputation for being a yellow belly who would do anything to avoid a fight. Leo quit heisting after a job went sour and left his partners dead even as he managed to slip away which didn’t exactly do anything to change what people think of him. However, when an old acquaintance and a crooked cop ask Leo to help them steal a fortune in diamonds being transported to court as evidence in a trial, the pay-off is too great for Leo to resist.
Then the job goes off without a hitch and Leo retires to a tropical island…. Not really. I just wanted to see if you were paying attention. Actually, as it usually happens in these kinds of stories, everything goes to hell, and Leo ends up with some very dangerous people after him. Even a coward has to stop running sometime.
This is an excellent start to the Criminal series in which Brubaker and Phillips do these gritty hard-boiled stories as self-contained gems, but if you read them all then an entire criminal underworld and its history is revealed as they take the basic noir scenarios and turn them on their head. Leo is an extremely well developed character with a backstory involving a criminal father, and the reasons behind his so-called cowardice are explored and explained in surprising ways.
In addition to Leo there’s a beautiful woman with a troubled past, dirty cops, psycho thugs, dingy bars,and shady characters; all the things that make crime fiction worth reading....more
They say that you can’t judge a book by its cover. However, my copy of this features a man apparently plunging to his doom after falling out of a hot They say that you can’t judge a book by its cover. However, my copy of this features a man apparently plunging to his doom after falling out of a hot air balloon. That’s accurate which proves that you can’t always believe old adages.
Travis McGee agrees to look into the murder of a wealthy man. Rich guys are getting bumped off all the time in crime stories, but the twist here is that this fella was already dying of cancer. Was it just a robbery gone bad or was someone looking for an angle to get his estate? McGee finds a possible connections to biker clubs and Hollywood, and he turns to some old friends for help in gaining access to both of those communities.
This is a pretty solid crime novel overall. McGee gets to do his usual thing of acting as both con man and detective to try and figure out who killed the rich old bastard and there’s a decent mystery for him to unravel. The social commentary and McGee’s ennui with modern life are toned down a lot at this point almost as if MacDonald was writing him as being more accepting of the world although there is one memorable rant in which Travis bitches mightily about how he keeps getting put into more and more computer databases. I don’t think McGee would have been a big user of social media.
Since we’re up to 1982 we also see a reduction in some of the sexism that goes along with the adventures of the ole Sea Cock. In fact, Trav is a one woman man in this one after hooking up with a pretty hotel manager. Of course, she only got that job after being the secretary and lover of the rich old bastard who died, and she lucked into the gig after that. Because a woman could never just earn an important job like running a hotel if she hadn’t been trained in the ways of business by the guy she was banging. And the lady that Meyer has a romantic interlude with is also a successful owner of a chain of newspapers, but of course she had to inherit the business from her late husband. That’s even less important than all the work she did to get into bikini shape for her vacation. So it’s not exactly a great example of feminism, but baby steps are welcome at this point. ...more
Only Elmore Leonard could make damn dirty hippies somewhat entertaining.
Chris Mankowski is a Detroit cop in the late ‘80s who transfers from the bomb Only Elmore Leonard could make damn dirty hippies somewhat entertaining.
Chris Mankowski is a Detroit cop in the late ‘80s who transfers from the bomb squad to sex crimes. His first case is a feisty young actress named Ginger (a/k/a Greta) who was sexually assaulted by alcoholic millionaire Woody Ricks. Chris takes a highly personal interest in Ginger’s case and starts checking out Woody and his brother just as two old associates from their college radical days embark on a scheme to shake down some money. Robin and Skip plan to use bombs to blow open Woody’s wallet while his chauffer Donnell, an ex-Black Panther, is also trying to scam the drunken Woody out of all he can.
Like most of his books, this involves a lot of shady characters with their own agendas saying great dialogue to each other as we get enough of their inner monologues to make all of them feel real. Leonard also famously wrote by the seat of his pants, making it all up as he went with no real plan, and usually that gives his books some fabulous twists and turns. However, sometimes this can give the book odd shifts, and that’s what happens here.
The first half focuses heavily on Robin and Skip’s past as former ‘60’s radicals who got sent to prison for their militant behavior and now are past all that peace, love, and dope bullshit. They want to get paid, and Leonard does a great job of characterization to quickly let you know that Robin and Skip’s old hippie days had a lot more to do with raising hell and getting laid than any high minded principles about protesting the Vietnam war or a corrupt capitalist system.
However, in the second half, this shifts a bit and become more about Chris. Leonard did a lot with characters seeing themselves in terms of pop culture, and there’s a great section where Chris, frustrated at all the murky motives and his relationship with Greta, sees Lethal Weapon and begins trying to act a bit like Mel Gibson with some hilarious results. There’s also a good deal from Donnel’s point of view as caretaker to a drunk that he’s trying to figure out a way to legally rob blind while holding off Robin and Skip. Then there’s a dilemma for Ginger who debates taking a settlement from Woody rather than trying to press legal charges.
All of this is pretty good, but it’s just a bit too much. It’s good enough, but just doesn’t feel as tight or as satisfying as some of his other plots. There’s also a bit of ickiness around how Chris is instantly attracted to Ginger even as she’s come into report her rape, and it seems more than a little odd that she’d be returning his affections pretty quickly.
Leonard did however know how to end the book perfectly. (view spoiler)[By blowing those two goddamn hippies to hell! (hide spoiler)] ...more
I invented a new drinking game based on The Thin Man and tried to give it a test run when I re-read it. The rules were simple, every time that main chI invented a new drinking game based on The Thin Man and tried to give it a test run when I re-read it. The rules were simple, every time that main character Nick Charles took a drink, I’d take one, too. However, I had to be taken to the hospital for treatment of extreme alcohol poisoning by the second chapter. So don’t try that.
Nick used to be a private detective in New York, but he left that behind when he married Nora and moved to California to take over the management of the various businesses her father left her. Why couldn’t Nora run them herself? Because this was 1933 so in addition to casual alcoholism being an accepted part of everyday life, the lady folks weren’t going to be left in charge of something as important as business. Ah, the good ole days…
Nick and Nora are on a Christmas vacation trip back to New York when Nick bumps into the daughter of an old client of his, Clyde Wynatt. Wynatt has gone missing and a woman associated him was murdered so everyone from the family to Wynatt’s lawyer to the cops think that Nick is working the case. Nick would prefer to just do some more drinking, but Nora is intrigued by the idea of watching her husband play detective and other events transpire to pull Nick into reluctantly investigating in between glasses of whiskey.
Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest are two of my favorite detective novels as well as being considered classics of the genre. This one shows off a bit of his versatility in that it reads as a witty comedy with a dash of murder rather than a hard boiled mystery. The banter between Nick and Nora is fun, and his casual remarks about needing a drink with breakfast just to “cut the phlegm” make for their own kind of anachronistic amusement.
The mystery is kind of a convoluted mess, but Hammett managed to tie it all together with a resolution that makes sense. It’s not my favorite book of his, but it’s got a dated charm that makes it a fun read. 3.65 stars....more
Robert B. Parker’s later books seemed to prove the saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks with him becoming very repetitive with his characRobert B. Parker’s later books seemed to prove the saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks with him becoming very repetitive with his characters and stories. However, maybe this one shows that if an old dog starts gnawing on a new bone that he might chew it up a little differently. At least for a while.
This wasn’t RBP’s first attempt at a western, but it was the first book in a new series in which he introduced Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, two lawmen for hire. Their latest gig is with the town of Appaloosa where a rancher named Bragg has a bunch of thugs who are terrorizing the locals, and Bragg killed the marshal who tried to bring some of them in. Virgil and Everett aren’t having too much trouble taking care of business until a pretty lady named Allie comes to town. She and Virgil become an item, but there are signs that maybe she isn’t quite as loyal to Virgil as he is to her.
On the surface that sounds a lot of RBP’s work, and that Cole and Hitch are just two old West versions of Spenser and Hawk. However, there’s a couple of interesting wrinkles. First, is that this is written from the first person view of Everett, and he knows that he’s essentially Virgil’s sidekick and willingly follows his lead. Everett is also a slight variation on the typical RBP character. Yeah, he’s reliable in a fight and operates under a certain code of behavior, but it’s Virgil’s code that he adopted because of his loyalty. Everett also likes to have a good time, enjoying his whiskey and regular dalliances with a prostitute he grows fond of. So he seems a bit different from the usual internalized stoics that RBP usually wrote as the good guys.
That also gives someone an outside perspective to one of RBP’s usual plots about a the main character being in love with a woman who really doesn’t deserve his devotion. As a long time reader I was sick to death of this trope of his, but it plays better him with Everett in the role of watching a friend make a mistake while doing his best to stand by him and limit the damage. It also leads to the most atypical ending that RBP did in his later years. (view spoiler)[ I was genuinely shocked that Everett willingly broke Virgil’s code in order to save him from himself by killing Bragg even though Everett knew it would mean the end of their partnership. (hide spoiler)]
Unfortunately, RBP undermined all the interesting and different things he did in this book by immediately reverting things back to his standard baseline and themes in the next one. Which is why I never bothered reading any more of the series after that. Still, this is an entertaining western, and it also got adapted into a pretty good movie starring Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen. ...more
Robert B. Parker writes a tough guy main character whose biggest flaw is his obsessive love of a woman who betrays him? Hmmmm…. I have the weirdest seRobert B. Parker writes a tough guy main character whose biggest flaw is his obsessive love of a woman who betrays him? Hmmmm…. I have the weirdest sense of deja vu….
By the late ‘90s RBP could, and frequently seemed to, crank out a Spenser novel in his sleep so he started doing other things like this series featuring new hero Jesse Stone. Jesse was an LAPD homicide detective who lost his job thanks to the drinking brought on when his unfaithful wife divorced him. Even though he shows up to the job interview drunk Jesse gets hired to be the chief of the police department in small town Paradise, Massachusetts. Anxious to leave his ex-wife in California, Jesse moves across the country and gets his boozing down to manageable levels.
Unfortunately, the town bigwig Hasty Hathaway hired a drunk to be the chief in the hopes that his criminal shenanigans would go unnoticed. However, while Jesse may be a functional alcoholic the key word there is ‘functional’, and he has no intention of looking the other way.
When an author who created an iconic character like Spenser develops a new one there’s inevitably going to be comparisons so the first question that a fan like myself has is how Jesse measures up. The answer is pretty well. RBP had his hero recipe down to his exact taste by then so he didn’t try to spice it up too much, but he did throw in some new flavors. Jesse is younger than Spenser, more internalized and not such a smart ass. He’s also got more baggage, but the two are definitely cut from the same cloth as the tough guys who don’t suffer fools or have much patience for politics and hypocrisy. All in all he makes for a pretty solid hero for this type of crime novel.
However, there are problems and they come from the author, not his lead character. In his later years RBP just could not get away from that repetitive theme of the good guy in love with a woman who isn’t really worthy of him. This one seemed to promise a breaking of old patterns with Jesse being among RBP’s most self-destructive main characters in some ways as well as actually making an effort to get over Jenn. It was more than a little disappointing when Jenn starts calling Jesse, and he resumes communicating with her because he just can’t let her go.
That’s the primary factor why I wasn’t a big fan of this series and didn’t even read all the ones that RBP did. So why go back and start reading these? Two reasons.
First, like Ace Atkins taking over Spenser and breathing new life into the character, Jesse Stone is now being written by veteran crime writer Reed Farrel Coleman, and I want to check out those books so going back to the beginning and going through seems necessary to really gauge those new ones.
Secondly, I was shocked to find that I enjoyed the TV movies starring Tom Selleck that were done based on the series. Although Selleck is a lot older than Jesse as written, the films have a brooding, character based atmosphere that feel like they’re improving upon the basic ideas of the book that build on the best of RBP rather than focusing on the boring repetitive elements. Catching some of those again as part of a Jesse Stone marathon gave me an itch to go back and give this series another try....more
If I’ve learned one thing from years of reading mystery novels it’s that you never want to go out on a boat with someone unless you’re 100% sure they If I’ve learned one thing from years of reading mystery novels it’s that you never want to go out on a boat with someone unless you’re 100% sure they don’t have a reason to murder you because it’s all too easy to wind up as fish food.
Police Chief Jesse Stone has his hands full dealing with all the party people that have swarmed the small town of Paradise MA as part of an annual month long series of boat races, but things get even more complicated when the decomposing body of a young woman washes up on shore. Some detective work identifies her as being Florence Horvath from a wealthy family in Florida, and Jesse suspects that she was running with a crowd of rich hedonists who treat sex about as seriously as a shaking hands. Florence’s twin sisters, who have the collective IQ of a Barbie doll, show up claiming that they want to see justice done, and Jesse also starts getting disturbing reports about local underage girls being part of the boat parties that Florence’s old gang are still having. It’s a nasty mess that will frequently leave Jesse wanting a hot shower, but he’s got a solid ally in Ft. Lauderdale Detective Kelly Cruz who helps him run down the Florida angles to the case.
This is an improvement over the last one in the series mainly because the on-going subplot of Jesse’s relationship with his ex-wife Jenn is given a lot less time. The two of them have a cautious reconciliation going, and Jesse has been sober for the better part of a year. Although the case makes Jesse question some of his own feelings about their complicated sex life, there is a lot less talk with and about Jenn here, and that’s a relief.
The mystery is decent although it often seems that Jesse leaves the actual grunt work of finding information to others, but that makes a certain amount of sense since he is the guy in charge. Still, there are a lot of scenes with people bringing witnesses, suspects and victims into him or him telling someone what he needs from them, and not a lot of him going out and beating the bushes himself to learn things.
There’s one kind of odd note related to Jesse’s drinking at the end of this one. (view spoiler)[After a year of sobriety the book closes with Jesse deciding that he can now have a couple of glasses of wine with Jenn as they eat dinner. That’s presented in the context of being a triumph for Jesse because it means that he thinks that their relationship is in a place where he can trust himself to do so. Which is just odd based on the idea that everything I’ve heard about alcoholism indicates that the two-drinks-a-day method never ends well. (It certainly didn’t for Matt Scudder when he tried it in his own series.) But RBP presented another character in Love & Glory who after being a raging drunk for a while is able to stop completely, then eventually resume social drinking so he didn’t exactly buy into what the friends of Bill would tell us. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to me either, but then again I think Jesse is an idiot to still be with Jenn so I guess he might as well drink up. (hide spoiler)] ...more
I don’t think it’s a good idea for two characters created by the same writer who each star in their own mystery series to have sex because it seems kiI don’t think it’s a good idea for two characters created by the same writer who each star in their own mystery series to have sex because it seems kind of incestuous and icky. Sadly, that’s the least of this book’s problems.
Police Chief Jesse Stone is trying to solve the murder of a famous radio/TV political talk show host named Walton Weeks who was hung from a tree after being shot to death, and his assistant was also murdered and left in a dumpster. Usually you could count on RBP to deliver at least an entertaining mystery in his later years even if he’d fallen into many repetitive patterns, but this one has a whole lotta issues in large part due to how it was written to dovetail with Jesse’s love life.
Ah, Jesse Stone’s love life… Give me a second. I gotta work up the energy to dive into this one.
*sigh*
OK, this starts out a very confusing note because the last book ended with Jesse and his ex-wife Jenn trying very hard to reconcile with encouraging signs that it might work. However, right at the beginning here they are in the midst of a major problems once again, and Jesse has taken up with the Sunny Randall, the star of another line of RBP novels. I happen to have read the book in her series where Sunny met and started dating Jesse so I had at least an idea of what was going on, but it’s a jarring place to begin with no explanation if you’re reading the Stone books in order.
Sunny and Jesse seem made for each other, and for one second it seems like maybe that Jesse will wise up and finally... FINALLY... ditch his awful ex-wife. It doesn’t last of course. Jenn pops up with a claim of being raped by a stranger that seems fairly dubious on its surface, and since Jesse is busy with the murder investigation, he asks Sunny to protect her and find the guy. Because you really want your current girlfriend and your ex-wife hanging out together in a time of emotional distress and high tension.
This is where the personal subplot trainwrecks the mystery. If most crime writers choose to have their victim be someone like a famous political commentator, then they’d play up that angle with suspects including various angry nut jobs or powerful enemies. However, RBP does nothing with those potential plots here because he’s much more focused on his pet themes of romantic love, adultery, and conflicted relationships. So rather than dig into any of the things that might make a mystery involving the murder of a talk show host interesting, he pays as little attention to that as possible so that he can immediately swerve the plot towards the victim’s sex life.
In fact, RBP was so uninvested in the political angle that he writes Weeks as having been a common sense libertarian who was genuinely interested in objectively exploring all aspects of an issue who was well regarded by both parties. (As if a guy like that could actually exist in the era of cable news.) So why write the victim to be someone who had a job that should have made him a lot of enemies and then immediately establish that he unrealistically had none?
Because RBP wanted the case to eventually have elements that would remind Jesse of his own situation, and it makes for a handy excuse as to why Jesse needs Sunny’s help with Jenn because he’s so busy dealing with the case. Which is also kind of a joke because despite the supposedly intense media scrutiny and political pressure to solve it, Jesse pretty much just ignores the media and even blows off the governor with no repercussions whatsoever. There’s not even a single conversation in which a town official expresses any concern to Jesse about the murder that has the attention of the nation.
It also makes for a nice summary on the book jacket: “Jesse Stone investigates the death of a high profile radio talk show host.” is designed to get readers more fired up then “Jesse Stone sulks about his love life in between looking into another murder.”
All of this is done in service of once again reestablishing RBP’s continued insistence to make Jesse an absolute chump when it comes to his ex-wife. He refuses to give her up no matter what she does even as he acknowledges the stupidity and cost of this because he loves her unconditionally even if it makes him miserable. That’s not love. That’s codependency. You could do one story with this theme and make a character seem tragic, but in an on-going series the idea that the hero just keeps making the same mistake over and over with no growth or possibility of change is beyond tiresome.
Even the mystery investigation parts seem like pretty weak sauce because of another failure by RBP. The man didn’t much like technology, and he only grudgingly included things like computers and cell phones in his later books. It hits a point here where that just looks increasingly silly. This was published in 2007, and yet Jesse, a police chief, doesn’t carry a phone? A cop can’t look something up on a computer without cursing it and asking for help? The entire plot hinges on revelations of the sort that would be public records that you’d think would immediately come up in routine background checks of the major players in the story, but RBP acts as if this was still the ‘70s and you only find something like a divorce filing if you go looking for it in the records room of some city hall. It’s another factor of how little thought he put into the idea that Weeks was supposed to be famous and yet these kind of things remained secret somehow.
The police chief of a small town, Jesse Stone, is just trying to enjoy a beer with the fellas after a softball game when one of his teammates finds thThe police chief of a small town, Jesse Stone, is just trying to enjoy a beer with the fellas after a softball game when one of his teammates finds the murdered body of a teenage girl floating in a nearby lake. Don’t you just hate it when you can’t get away from work?
Trying to identify the dead girl and figure out who killed her will lead Jesse to a variety of people including terrible parents, a pretty school principal, a dangerous gangster, a drunken novelist, and a nun running a shelter for teenage runaways. As Jesse tracks the girl’s history and movements he begins to feel a deep empathy for her as he learns how she was ill-used by her family, her schoolmates, and the people who took advantage of her when she was on the streets.
As usual though, Jesse’s problems at work take a backseat to his on-going and increasingly tedious issues with his ex-wife, Jenn. The two of them are unable to let each other go, and yet Jenn can’t commit to Jesse and sleeps with other guys even as he too is carrying on with one gorgeous woman after another. The two of them understand that this is dysfunctional but justify their actions by the ‘deep bond’ they have. The limbo of being together but apart is not helping Jesse’s drinking, and he reluctantly lets Jenn coax him into seeing an alcohol counselor.
The bit of saving grace with that sub-plot is found in Jesse seeing some of him and Jenn in domestic violence case he works in which he ultimately realizes that the husband is beating his wife in an effort to control her out of fear of losing her. Jessie likes to act like his refusal to love anyone but Jenn is what makes them special and sets their drama apart from the common failings that destroy other couples, but dealing with the fall out of an abusive relationship hits a nerve with Jesse. It’s at least a nod towards acknowledging that Jesse and Jenn aren’t so much romantic star-crossed lovers as just two people who really should get the hell away from each other although Robert B. Parker could never entirely abandon similar themes of unhealthy ideas of true love in all his later books.
It ends up being a pretty typical RBP novel on the mystery side of things, but it also seems like he was stretching a bit to give Jesse some depth and make him a touch more self-aware so that probably makes it the best of the three in the series so far. ...more
There’s a married couple in this book whose idea of fun is stalking strangers and then killing them together. The sad thing is that those two murdererThere’s a married couple in this book whose idea of fun is stalking strangers and then killing them together. The sad thing is that those two murderers have a healthier relationship than the hero of the story does with the love of his life.
In addition to trying to track down the thrill killers that are terrorizing his town, police chief Jesse Stone is also looking into the gang rape of a teenage girl. As usual, any detective work has to take a back seat to Jesse’s personal life which continues to be a mess thanks to his obsession with his ex-wife Jenn.
The relationship between Jesse and Jenn is the anchor that drags this series down. Jenn insists that she can’t imagine a life without Jesse even as she continues to sleep with other men, and Jesse devotion is such that he puts up with it in the hope of getting her back permanently. As many other characters point out to Jesse this means that Jenn gets to do whatever she wants while knowing that she can always come back to him at some point. Jesse always replies that while he knows that it's not fair to himself that he loves her and won’t give up unless she tells him that it’s over for good. While Robert B. Parker obviously meant for this to make Jesse seem kind of tragically noble and a romantic at heart, it really just makes him a tiresome idiot.
There finally appears to be a ray of hope in this that Jesse will wise up after Jenn does something that asks too much of him and pushes him past what seems to be a breaking point. During this time Jesse hooks up with sexy attorney Rita Fiore who is a character imported from RBP’s Spenser series, and for one brief shining moment it seems that Jesse is finally ditching the shallow and selfish Jenn for a far superior upgrade. Jesse even finally gets his drinking under control. Alas, RBP will always write his characters to be entirely sold on his twisted concept of true love so Jesse will once again turn his back on a potentially good relationship so that sub-plot turns into a cruel tease.
So much of the book is spent on this aspect that it seems like RBP didn’t put much effort into the actual crime and mystery parts. Jesse investigations are lackadaisical on both plots as one of his cops leads the charge on the rape case, and most of the serial killer investigation consists of Jesse waiting on the state police to provide him some lists of gun owners as weeks/months pass and more people die. It’s also a bit unseemly that (view spoiler)[after a woman he just slept with is murdered that he has little outward reaction and is soon having sex with Rita Fiore. It’s also hard to believe that two people who are supposed to be good at their jobs like Jesse and Rita would sleep together when she’s defending the rapists he’s trying to get prosecuted. (hide spoiler)]
There was probably a better book in the crime story here that was completely overshadowed by the frustrating nature of Jesse’s personal sub-plots. ...more
Robert B. Parker cooked up an ex-convict named Jimmy Macklin who has an ambitious scheme to loot an entire island populated by some Parker vs. Parker?
Robert B. Parker cooked up an ex-convict named Jimmy Macklin who has an ambitious scheme to loot an entire island populated by some very wealthy people, and he recruits a crew to help him blow up a bridge, take out a private security force, empty a bank and then make a getaway by boat so it certainly seems like he might have taken a page out of Richard Stark’s novels about professional thief Parker.
However that’s where the similarities end. For one thing, instead of being a humorless professional who wants to do the job quickly and cleanly, Jimmy is a reckless daredevil who cares more about the thrill of the heist than profiting from it. Another difference is that the book isn’t about Jimmy, it’s about the police chief Jesse Stone.
In this second book of the series, Jesse has settled into his role as the head of the Paradise PD, but his personal life continues to be a controlled train wreck. The cheating ex-wife he tried to leave behind in LA has followed him across the country, and the two of them have cautiously started dating again even as both of them are doing more banging than a screen door with other people. Even as his own cops are mocking his man-ho tendencies, Jesse can’t stop himself from following his ex when she’s out on a date and fantasizing about murdering the man she’s with.
The book would have been a lot better if half of it wasn’t consumed with Jesse’s love life. In fact, so much of it is dedicated to that the whole robbery of an entire island comes across as almost an afterthought. RBP also wasn’t the kind of writer who could naturally make a pulp concept like a gang looting a town work as well as someone like Stark (a/k/a Donald Westlake) could.
The main problem with this whole thing is that Jesse appears to have been created with the idea of being a more flawed hero then Spenser with his drinking problem and being unable to let go of his ex-wife. (Which as I’ve pointed out in numerous reviews is a well that RBP went to way too often.) That could have been an idea that worked well, but RBP liked his heroes to seem heroic. So even as he saddles Jesse with a mountain of baggage and questionable decisions, he can’t help but write him as a guy to be admired.
We’re supposed to think that his messed up relationship with his ex is a sign of a man who believes in true love rather then seeming exactly like kind of ugly domestic situation that eventually ends in a murder/suicide. Jesse was more interesting to me as a guy who had at least tried to distance himself from a bad relationship, and he seems more like a drunken chump in this book....more
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