hugh_u_kidden's Full Review: Robert B. Parker - Night Passage
My wife tends to leave me alone when I'm reading; she figures if I'm sitting still with a book in my hand, I'm not going to get into trouble. Ok, there have been exceptions, such as my taking that Spiderman graphic novel to our wedding, but those are few and far between.
Anyhow, I'm a Robert B. Parker fan from the word "go". I own nearly the entire "Spenser" mystery series, and was delighted to find Parker branching into another lead character, the calm, quiet, yet internally tormented Jesse Stone.
Night Passage introduces us to Jesse Stone, a 35-year-old former homicide detective with the L.A.P.D. who has been fired for drunkenness. Stone is at rock bottom in life; his marriage to a young starlet has failed, he's lost his job, he can't control the bottle, and his outlook is a bleak and dark as the windswept Pacific Ocean view he is looking at as the novel opens.
Yet Jesse Stone may have options open to him...he has been hired to become Chief of Police in the small town of Paradise, Massachusetts after an interview during which he showed up intoxicated and trying to hide it. After a long introspective drive across country, he arrives in Paradise expecting a token job, and finding much more.
The pleasant small-town community of Paradise appears to have a few skeletons in the closet, and it doesn't take Stone long to discover possible ties linking the President of the town's Board of Selectmen to both a local militia group and a Boston mob. Plus, the town's former chief has become victim to a strange-looking murder in Wyoming, and a local muscle-bound bully doesn't seem to like Jesse Stone's very presence in town. Add to this a triple murder, and the new chief is much busier than he ever expected. Yet Stone is determined to get to the bottom of it all, with cool logic, good guesses, and deductive work that is both simple and complex at the same time, and very easy to follow.
Like all of Robert B. Parker's books, this one ticks along at a good pace, and the lead character is very compelling. Jesse Stone is a much quieter and darker, younger protagonist than Parker's hugely successful Spenser, with a drier sense of humor than the Boston-based private investigator. Yet Stone is also very intelligent, very cool and tough, and develops his own personality well as he wrestles with the town politicos, the cases he is involved in, and his own inner demons.
Other characters show great potential as well: Molly Crane, mother of two and Paradise's lone female cop is bright, brave, sassy and sensitive, Arthur "Suitcase" Simpson is a slightly slow thinking yet very intelligent young officer with great enthusiasm for his job, and both have great beginnings here, and promise to flesh out well in future novels. Jennifer Stone, the starlet ex-wife of Jesse, makes frequent appearances as well, as someone that just can't seem to let go of Jesse, nor can he entirely let go of her.
Nice crossovers with the Spenser series exist in this flagship novel of the Paradise series as well; Boston mobster Gino Fish, a frequent character in the Spenser novels makes an appearance here, as does Gino's head enforcer and bodyguard Vinnie Morris.
Currently four novels exist in the Paradise series; with each one the characters has developed nicely in Parker's smooth and colorful style. Jesse Stone has had a cameo appearance himself in one of Parker's most recent Spenser novels, and the two characters interact very well. Yet in this, the flagship of the Paradise series, we are treated to the beginnings of another fine addition to the Parker World...and the origins of it all is sweet stuff indeed.
Yours until I can get these fireworks burns out of my underwear (never mind)
Hugh U. Kidden
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