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Over a period of many years and myriad books, Robert B. Parker has consistently delivered quality crime fiction and NIGHT PASSAGE, his latest fast-paced and to-the- point foray, is no exception. Parker keeps his chapters short and his sentences terse, the better to keep the pages turning while he steers us down into the labyrinth of Paradise, Massachusetts --- on the surface a sedate, charming New England town whose soft white underbelly is, of course, besmirched.
Parker fans have additional cause to celebrate NIGHT PASSAGE for its introduction of Jesse Stone, a detective who delivers as much punch as Spenser, Parker's first world-famous detective. While still a more than adequate read, in recent years Spenser has been tamed by love and has appeared a little too settled, a touch docile, not quite the street-wise, just-this-side-of-felon character he used to be. It is a pleasure to welcome the bedeviled but beguiling Jesse Stone, he of the long silences and true heart.
Initially based in L.A., Stone is a man who has watched his life there spin into a vortex and right down the drain. Once a savvy homicide cop Stone was dumped first by Jennifer, his beautiful, ditzy, actress wife, and then by the LAPD, thanks to his predilection for booze. As the novel opens, Stone is a man besieged by confusion and regret. He is cut adrift in all ways: family, home and job have all escaped him. Wise enough to realize that he is up against the wall, Jesse decides to flee. Paradise is waiting.
After a retrospectively embarrassing drunken interview in a Chicago hotel room, Stone is inexplicably chosen by Paradise's town fathers to be its new chief of police. Happy to put a continent between himself and his ex-life, Jesse takes the job. Then the fun begins. Paradise is a hotbed of corruption boasting an armed white supremacist militia, a police force run by a single man with his own twisted agenda and a brain-dead heavy with a decidedly mean streak. Mob connections in Boston, murder, nymphomania and gun-running complicate the mix further until Jesse Stone, chosen for his drunken indifference, finds that responsibility piques the silence within him and guides him to do the right thing.
Robert B. Parker is a veteran crime writer who has decided not to rest on his laurels. Jesse Stone is worth Parker's effort and I look forward to witnessing his next adventure. Stone --- a man who "has never gotten into trouble saying too little" --- is a man I'd like to hear more from.
--- Reviewed by Jessie Woeltz
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