Jesse Stone takes a few days off from being police of chief in Paradise to attend a reunion of his old minor league baseball club that has been put toJesse Stone takes a few days off from being police of chief in Paradise to attend a reunion of his old minor league baseball club that has been put together by Vic Prado, one of his former teammates who made it to the majors where he had a successful career. Vic is the guy who made the throw that got Jesse hurt and ended his own dreams of baseball glory. He also stole Jesse’s girlfriend at the time and later married her.
And you thought your high school reunion was awkward….
It turns out that after baseball Vic has gotten involved in a shady financial scheme with a dangerous Boston gangster for a partner, and now that the walls are closing in he was hoping to ask for Jesse’s help. However, Vic’s plan goes off the rails almost immediately which gets a young college girl killed and her wealthy boyfriend kidnapped back in Paradise. As Jesse tries to figure out what’s going on he’ll have to deal with the asshole father of the missing boy, a dangerous hit man, and a mysterious new love interest who has her own agenda regarding Vic. If that isn’t enough, seeing Vic opens up a lot of old emotional wounds that make it even harder than usual for Jesse to keep the cork in the Scotch bottle.
This is a fairly odd situation. Robert B. Parker started this series late in his career, and while he tried to make Jesse different his best known creation, Spenser, he was so locked into certain themes and his own sparse style that Jesse came across as just an internalized drunk who was unhealthily obsessed with his ex-wife. Which might work if you’re trying to make a flawed lead character, but RBP also couldn’t really let go of trying to make Jesse a Spenser-esque hero, either.
Then after RBP’s death his family had Michael Brandman carry on the Jesse Stone series, and since Brandman had been a producer/screenwriter on a pretty good set of TV movies based on the books that seemed like a solid choice. However, the three books Brandman did weren't good with Jesse coming across as a terrible cop who abused his authority for minor matters while ignoring bigger crimes.
I assume the fan response to Brandman was why Reed Farrel Coleman replaced him, and the results are promising in this first attempt. The biggest difference is in character work because RBP pretty much just worked off established templates in his later books so everybody seemed thin and one note. Here, Coleman spends time building up all the major players so that they all have inner lives and a distinct point of view. Coleman manages to build up some nobility and sympathy for a villain who seems irredeemable at the start, and even an entitled star athlete like Vic who is entirely motivated by self-interest has a world view a reader can understand.
In Coleman’s hands Jesse finally seems like a wholly realized person, and not like some shambling Frankenstein’s monster made up of random bits leftover from RBP's files and unproduced screenplays. He’s still an internalized guy who is struggling to cope with alcoholism, but he’s more self-aware of his flaws instead of seeming like a robot fueled by Scotch. While Jesse still has many of the tough-guy traits you’d expect in this kind of series, he also seems more like a decent guy doing his best rather than someone who thinks he’s above normal human interactions.
It’s not a home run of a book. The plot wanders somewhat, and I found the way that several of the bad guys suddenly develop consciences late in the book unbelievable. I also wasn’t wild that while wrapping up most of the story that it ends on a big cliffhanger.
Still, this was a Jesse Stone book that I mostly liked so maybe the third writer is the charm. 3.5 stars....more
I hate to see anybody lose their job, but I understand why Michael Brandman was replaced as the writer of this series.
Small town police chief Jesse StI hate to see anybody lose their job, but I understand why Michael Brandman was replaced as the writer of this series.
Small town police chief Jesse Stone has two big problems. First, after a young female prostitute is murdered in a seedy motel Jesse has to first identify her, and then try to find her killer which puts him in between a couple of rival pimps. Second, Jesse suspects that the local nursing home is both negligent and abusive in its care of its elderly residents, but the company that owns it has already survived one scandal thanks to an army of lawyers so getting it shut down won’t be easy.
As I’ve noted in the reviews of the other two Brandman books I’m baffled at how badly he whiffs on these because he was a producer and screenwriter of several TV movies starring Tom Selleck based on this character, and they’re actually pretty good. So having him take over after Robert B. Parker’s death seemed like a no-brainer.
He did some stuff I like such as having Jesse finally get over his awful ex-wife and address his drinking problem. Yet, he comes across as incredibly bad at his job. In these recent books Jesse seems to fixate on trivial aspects of what’s going on while ignoring major things, and he generally delegates most of the work to other people. There are also several examples of abuses of power by a police chief. So the character has become inconsistent, incompetent, and just a bad cop all around even as he’s still presented as our hero.
Part of the problem is that the world created here just doesn’t make a lot of sense. Any fictional story about a cop, particularly a series like this, is going to have stretch things past the point of reality, but this gets too far off the rails. For example, one of the suspects in the woman's murder wants to kill Jesse later in the book and word gets out. Several people act like Jesse is all on his own, and that he should drop the case. Even one of his own police officer's tells him to forget about the investigation. That’s completely unbelievable, that everyone acts like a police chief is so at risk from one minor criminal that he’d consider dropping a murder investigation. Cops just don’t operate like that, even small town ones.
Another crazy thing is that when Jesse starts going after the crooked rest home we hear a lot about how this company has enormous influence and power. Yet when Jesse starts using local fire and health inspections to get the place cited their response is to first try and bribe him, and then later several of the people in charge go after Jesse and other cops physically. That’s not how white collar criminals do things. Even if they had financial problems they’d just declare bankruptcy and find a way to walk off with a bunch of cash and come up with a new scheme.
There’s also some lazy inconsistencies. Jesse had a cat in the last book, and every time he goes home Brandman made a point to have him interact with the cat who is all over him. Here, we follow Jesse through his evening routine as he’s thinking about what’s going on a couple of times without a single mention of the cat. Yet, late in the book the cat just shows up again with no explanation as to why he wasn’t around earlier.
Another one is that per the earlier books in the series and the TV movies, Jesse doesn’t wear a police uniform. Brandman never describes what he’s wearing on the job here, but I assumed he was still wearing civilian clothes but it’s never made clear. In one scene, Jesse borrows a nightstick from one of his officers to beat the shit out of some people so you think that he is not walking around with all the gear that a uniformed police officer would be. However, in the very next chapter Brandman has Jesse pull a nightstick off his own service belt without ever explaining why Jesse would need to borrow one in the previous chapter, and the way it’s presented here is that he always has one on him.
It’s a parade of things like that which make Brandman’s run on this series such a mess. It’s ill-defined and sloppy in many ways while he focused on trying to do the Robert B. Parker style of dialogue. He doesn’t really pull that off either....more
Pop quiz. If you were the chief of police in a small town, which of these issues would be your top priority?
1) A movie production has started filming,Pop quiz. If you were the chief of police in a small town, which of these issues would be your top priority?
1) A movie production has started filming, and in addition to all the logistical headaches that creates, the lead actress is worried about her safety because she’s trying to divorce her drug addicted husband who has physically assaulted her in the past.
2) Officials at the local water company may have been rigging the meter readings to overcharge customers which would be a criminal conspiracy that affected the entire town.
3) One bratty rich girl keeps driving while texting despite repeated warnings.
If you answered #3, congratulations! You’d be just as bad a cop as Jesse Stone.
To be fair, the rich brat did cause a serious traffic accident, and her parents are major league assholes so it is a legit problem. However, while facing the other two issues Jesse chooses to delegate most everything related to the movie production to one of his officers while arranging for a guy he once pursued as a dangerous criminal to be the actress’ bodyguard. Plus, even when he suspects the water commissioner of shenanigans Jesse doesn’t call in some accountants or utilities experts to perform an audit and investigation, he just kind of casually happens to talk to the people at the water company involved in the fraud. Hell, he doesn’t even check his own water bill to see if anything looks off.
Instead, most of his focus and action is directed towards dealing with the young lady who is a chronic texter while driving. Again, I know this is a serious problem, but even when Jesse manages to get some legal action taken against her he also continues to involve himself with the idea of turning the girl around for the better. Noble, but as I’ve outlined here, he’s really got better things to do. So no surprise that everything goes to hell on him.
This seems to be all part of a weird situation with this series at this time. After Robert B. Parker’s death his family chose Michael Brandman to continue it, and since Brandman had been the writer/producer of a series of pretty good TV movies based on these books that made a lot of sense. Yet in these first two books he did Jesse really comes across as a cop who abuses his power over trivial matters while ignoring major situations.
It’s not surprising to me then that Brandman only did one more of these before the series was handed over to Reed Farrel Coleman. The writing is decent enough and mimics the style of Parker, but the plotting choices make Jesse out to be pretty awful at his job....more
After Robert B. Parker died his family decided to farm out his characters to other writers, and that’s tricky business. However, the hiring of Ace AtkAfter Robert B. Parker died his family decided to farm out his characters to other writers, and that’s tricky business. However, the hiring of Ace Atkins to take over Spenser turned out to be an inspired choice that revitalized the series. I’d had a fairly low opinion of the Jesse Stone books, but oddly enough had liked the TV movies based on them starring Tom Selleck because they’d toned down the elements I didn’t care for and turned them into a well crafted set of low key mysteries with a brooding atmosphere. So picking one of the main producers and screenwriters of those to carry on seemed like a natural fit.
Well, it looked like a good idea on paper.
There’s a lot to question about Michael Brandman’s choices here. First off, he seems hellbent on shaping the books to conform to the TV movies by having Jesse buy a new house that matches the one that the Selleck version lives in, and he also dumps the budding romance that RBP had started for Jesse in his last book. There’s no real purpose to it other than to try and make the books match the movies and discovering that Jesse and Sunny have gone their separate ways in between books is a bummer if you’d been rooting for those two crazy kids to finally get together.
Even worse is the story here because Jesse comes across as a rogue cop who is also a raging hypocrite. After a string of car thefts turns into a murder case Jesse’s reaction is not to investigate or try to do anything through normal police channels. Instead he immediately launches an off-the-books sting operation in which he illegally holds a suspect for days in a locked room and threatens to murder him. A lot of crime books feature a cop getting his hands dirty at some point, and Jesse has never been above breaking a rule if the situation called for it, but going Code Red right from the jump before even trying to do anything else to stop the bad guys seems like a huge overreaction.
Then we’ve got a subplot involving a revenge seeking ex-con coming to Paradise because Jesse’s beating of him back in his drunken days with the LAPD left the guy with brain damage. Seems like that man has a legitimate beef.
Another subplot finds Jesse trying to help a teenage girl who has been bullied by her classmates. That seems like a pretty noble cause. Yet Jesse meets this girl while she’s holding a gun on her principal. Jesse blames the principal for not helping the girl enough and never charges her with anything. In fact, he then proceeds to shame the principal mercilessly for failing to help the girl enough. Which is true, but it’s just completely nuts that in this day and age that Jesse doesn’t arrest someone who brought a gun to a school and threatened somebody with it.
So Jesse is willing to illegally kidnap a suspect and hold him without due process, he once used unnecessary force that permanently disabled a man, and he doesn’t charge a student who threatens someone with a gun in a school. That’d make you think that Jesse is completely off the rails here and doesn’t give a damn about the rules, right?
Yet when the town’s PR lady (Who just happens to be Jesse’s latest sex partner.) is trying to set up a rock concert Jesse points out that the town curfew is 11 PM, and that he’ll enforce any noise ordinances after that time even if she gets a waiver from the city council.
Yeah, that Jesse is a real stickler for the the rules...
The whole thing is just a mishmash of inconsistent character traits that make the book a mess, and while reading I was hoping that someone would stop Jesse’s reign of terror. The only good thing about this is that it gave me a new appreciation for what a great job Ace Atkins did with the Spenser series, and I can only hope that when the series is handed over to the next writer in a few books that it improves....more
Jesse Stone meets beautiful twin sisters in this one, but instead of doubling his fun it’s twice the amount of murder he has to deal with.
The ParadiseJesse Stone meets beautiful twin sisters in this one, but instead of doubling his fun it’s twice the amount of murder he has to deal with.
The Paradise cops discover the body of a professional thug in the trunk of his car with a couple of bullets in his head. The investigation leads to a the dead guy’s employer, a Boston mobster with a unique living situation. He’s married to one of the gorgeous twins, and another gang leader is married to the other. The sisters like to be close so the two gangsters have neighboring houses in Paradise, and you gotta imagine that having two organized crime leaders living side by side has gotta wrecked the property values of the entire neighborhood. Jesse soon finds reasons to take a close look at the woman who have a long history of promiscuous behavior as well as using their identical appearance to play games with their sex partners.
As he’s trying to unravel this mess Jesse is also trying to determine the exact nature of his relationship with another character moonlighting from her own series, Sunny Randall, but the two of them have plenty of hang-ups with their ex-spouses to make this problematic. Sunny is also working a case in Paradise that involves trying to determine whether a young woman living in a religious commune has been brainwashed or is there of her own free will.
This is the last Jesse Stone book that Robert B. Parker wrote before his death, and since it also features the final appearance of Sunny Randall it’s his last word on two of his major characters. Fortunately, it ends on a relatively high note with both Jesse and Sunny finally beginning to move past their obsessive relationships with their exes that had consumed their earlier books, and it’s a relief that the two of them had finally started to break out of the doomed cycles the author had imposed on them for far too long.
They crime parts of the story aren’t anything special. As usual with a later RBP book everything is driven by motives related to sex and relationships, but it’s fairly entertaining. I especially liked a very cold blooded move that Jesse pulls at the end of this one.
It’s not a fantastic final story with Jesse and Sunny, but it could have been a lot worse....more
Even though he’s the police chief of a small town Jesse Stone has faced some big time threats like murderers, professional thieves and organized crimeEven though he’s the police chief of a small town Jesse Stone has faced some big time threats like murderers, professional thieves and organized crime. So it seems like kind of a let down that his two enemies here are a Peeping Tom and a female high school principal inspecting the underwear of some of her students. It's not exactly Sherlock Holmes facing Moriarty.
In his later work Robert B. Parker seemed content to have every scene be about his characters having coffee and doughnuts or throwing down a few cocktails while they exchange banter. It’s got a style and rhythm that’s familiar so it’s as if you’re listening to a song you like but have heard so many times that you don’t even really hear it anymore. It is a little weird that (view spoiler)[ while Jesse’s body count has been relatively low compared to Spenser that he and his two best officers end up shooting the peeper in what was effectively suicide-by-cop. Yeah, the guy had escalated to threatening women with a gun to get them to undress and photograph them, but he was written to be more pathetic than villain so it’s jarring that he’d be someone that Jesse ends up shooting when he’s dealt with far worse people that he didn’t kill. (hide spoiler)]
So this is a typical example of the kind of 3 star book that RBP churned out like a human printing press in his later years. It’s not as good as his early stuff, but it’s still got the elements that his fans enjoyed. However, I’m really tempted to give it 5 stars for the ending.
(view spoiler)[I nearly stood up and cheered when Jesse finally told his horrible ex-wife Jenn to take a hike, and it was extra sweet that it was in the context of moving forward with a relationship with Sunny Randall who also shows signs of finally letting go of her ex-husband. It’s like both characters got slightly redeemed here. It was way too long in coming, but was kind of shocking because I would have bet money that RBP was incapable and/or unwilling to finally acknowledge that Jesse’s obsession with is ex was the sign of an unhealthy relationship rather than a form of true love in which a character had to suffer the flaws of their partner. I’m so satisfied with it that I’m worried about reading the last book in this series that RBP wrote before his death lest he revert back to his usual form. (hide spoiler)]...more
The setup here goes back to the second book of the series Trouble In Paradise in which Police Chief Jesse Stone faced a crew of professional thieves iThe setup here goes back to the second book of the series Trouble In Paradise in which Police Chief Jesse Stone faced a crew of professional thieves including Winston ‘Crow’ Cromartie that looted an entire wealthy island of Jesse's ocean side community. Crow got away, but he’s returned now that the statute of limitations has run out on that crime, and he’s taken a job to locate the missing daughter of a crime kingpin from Florida. However, Crow balks when the kingpin orders him to murder his wife who was trying to hide the kid from him which forces Jesse into an uneasy partnership with Crow to try and protect the women.
The idea of a cop having to team up with a guy he knows is a criminal isn’t half-bad, but the execution is so completely botched that all the characters come across as incompetent and unlikable to the point where I was kinda hating everyone by the the end of it. Robert B. Parker’s books were never police procedurals, and he often had flawed characters bending the law for the greater good, but this one just stretches credibility far past the breaking point.
First and foremost, we’re supposed to buy into the idea that even though Crow was involved in multiple felonies including murder, kidnapping, bank robbery, and the deaths of two police officers that Jesse makes only a token effort to build a case against him before giving up and just trying to keep an eye on him in a half-assed kind of way. I’m pretty sure that the FBI would have more than a few things to say about the bank robbery alone. It also seems that Jesse and his cops forget all about their two guys who died during a crime that Crow was part of because none of them seem to hold a grudge other than a few random comments about their deaths. Even when Jesse knows that Crow has been running around shooting people later in the book he just shrugs it off.
RBP loved writing about certain types of badasses who are all of a kind that recognized and respected each other no matter what side of the law they were on, and that’s what he was going for here. However the circumstances under which Jesse met Crow in the previous book just do not allow for any type of believable plot other than Jesse doing everything he can to immediately arrest Crow. It really felt like RBP was trying to take a character he’d created as a pure criminal and tried to retcon him into being another Hawk. Plus, the whole idea of the statute of limitations being a factor also creates a huge problem with the internal timeline of the series.
There’s the usual nonsense with Jesse’s ex-wife Jenn and their inability to either let each other go or maintain a healthy relationship, but because of RBP committing to the ten year time frame (Which aligned to the publishing dates of the books as well.) it also means that Jesse and Jenn have now spent over a decade in which they’ve been unable to get their shit together even with the help of therapists. The idea that the two of them having been doing this same exact routine for that long with no improvement or end in sight just makes me tired.
We’ve also got severe problems in that Jesse is supposed to be bending the rules and working with Crow because he’s trying to save a girl. However, she’s an unlikeable little shit who also is involved with some truly evil stuff. (view spoiler)[She helps get her own mother murdered without a second thought or moment of regret, and she’s also willing to set Crow up to be killed. (hide spoiler)] Yet by the end Jesse has risked the lives of his officers as well as his own career to help this girl, and absolutely nothing is done to hold her responsible for her actions.
Overall, Jesse comes across as even more than a sap than ever because at least it’s usually just his ex-wife that he allows to manipulate him, but here Crow plays him for a chump as well. Even the other supporting characters who have generally been reliable also turn into sex crazed idiots, and yet it’s all played as if it’s a cute source of amusement.
(view spoiler)[Bad enough that Suitcase Simpson apparently has a thing for older married women, but it’s especially galling when Molly has a one night stand because not only has she been the conscience of Jesse's department, she also frequently reminds everyone that she's happily married with four kids. She was also disgusted and repulsed at the behavior of promiscuous people when watching sex tapes as part of another case in an earlier book. It seems extra skeevy that Suitcase is sleeping with a women who is being a pain in the ass to Jesse by trying to keep poor kids from being bussed into her area, and that Molly sleeps with Crow with little thought or regard that he's a killer who was involved with a crime that resulted in the deaths of two of her fellow cops. It’s extra salt in the wound that it’s Jenn, who is incapable of monogamy with Jesse, who gives the blessing to this business that absolves Molly of any guilt. (hide spoiler)]
I’m not even sure of who I was supposed to be rooting for because the supposed hero of this series came across as complete rube who is not only incapable of arresting a guy he knows committed multiple crimes, he essentially ends up getting played for the entire book in the interest of trying to save a worthless kid who is guilty of terrible things herself. ...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
Loading...
