Robert B Parker"s Fool's Paradise - Mike Lupica

 A recent (2020) entry in the Jesse Stone continuation series, this time by Mike Lupica (who also continues the Sunny Randall series).  It raises what might be a problem with this sort of activity.  I don't know how Parker himself handled his characters; did he overlap them between series?  Lupica does here, and he does it too much for my taste.  Stone and Randall are an item - OK, fair enough - but it goes much further, even Spenser gets a mention.  And backstories of all kinds, personal and plot-oriented, come too much to the fore.

To an extent, this is inevitable.  The secondary plotline is that participants in an old rape case are being hunted down.  The main plot falls into the family secrets category.  But do we need a visit to good old Hasty Hathaway (from the first Jesse Stone novel, Night Passage, reviewed below) in prison?  Nope.

So, gripe over...  Does the novel grip?  Yes it does.  Is the writing good?  Yes it is.  I didn't like it as much as Lupica's writing in whichever Sunny Randall I read, but nevertheless it is high quality.  I fell for the red herrings and did not guess the final twist.  Perfectly enjoyable and at key times genuinely thrilling.

The Shameless - Ace Atkins

Before finding The Shameless, all I knew of Ace Atkins was that he had been chosen to continue the Spenser novels of the late Robert B Parker.  Now it turns out that Atkins has written a whole bunch of novels in his own right, including a hatful of True Crime Novels which seem right up my street.

The Shameless is the ninth in his Quinn Colson series.  It matters not at all that I hadn't read the previous eight - Atkins has used the ingenious device of a couple of podcasters from New York who come to Tibbehah County, Mississippi, to investigate a young man's mysterious death thirty years earlier, who inevitably unearth Colson's back-story.  Colson was at school with the late Brandon Taylor; both were avid hunters given to disappearing into the woods.  Quinn Colson famously came back, poor old Brandon didn't.  Eventually the local sheriff found him with his brains blown out.  Suicide, the sheriff decided.  The sheriff back then was Quinn Colson's uncle.  He, too, shot himself twenty years later.

Back in 1990 Quinn Colson and his best friend Boom were teenage tearaways.  Then they joined the military, became rangers, served in Afghanistan and became heroes.  Boom came home missing an arm.  Quinn returned to become sheriff.  Now he is married to Maggie who, back in the day, just happened to be Brandon Taylor's girlfriend.  When he married Maggie, Quinn also took on her son from her previous marriage - who, of course, is called Brandon.

While the podcasters did into the past, Quinn Colson has more than enough trouble to deal with in the present day.  Senator Jimmy Vardaman is running for the governorship.  Vardaman is a huckster, claiming to be against the corrupt political system, promising to bring traditional values back to Mississippi.  Obviously he is corrupt as hell, riding on criminal money instead of the traditional vested interests.  Quinn Colson doesn't care a damn for Vardaman or his personal militia; he is after the Syndicate who control him.

It's a dense and dangerous system in which it's well night impossible to tell the bad guys from the good.  It gets even more complicated when an anonymous letter to Maggie Colson leads to Quinn finding the remains of a young woman, not far from where Brandon Taylor was found, dating back to the same time he died.

I loved the deep back-story to The Shameless.  I really enjoyed Atkins' writing style - sharp, intelligent, but retaining a flavour of William Faulkner and other chroniclers of the Deep South.  I've got some serious catching up to do with Mr Atkins.

Only To Sleep - Lawrence Osborne - Lawrence Osborne

I was unfamiliar with Lawrence Osborne, once very familiar with Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe.  Here, the two come together, Osborne having been commissioned by the copyright owners to write a Marlowe continuation novel, alongside the better-known John Banville and Robert B Parker.

Osborne does it very well.  He takes the latest possible birth date for Marlowe and has him as a septuagenarian in the late 1980s, living in retirement in Mexico.  He is contacted by an insurance company who want him to investigate the death of wealthy US socialite Donald Zinn who recently turned up drowned on a Mexico beach.  Suspicions have been raised because Zinn's widow Dolores is very much younger and now very much richer.

The insurance company makes Marlowe a generous offer.  He thinks, one last payday, a sort of farewell tour of Southern California and other parts of Mexico.  Where's the harm?

Marlowe soon finds out.  This is 1988, after all, the age of new money, wealth-worship and mega con-tricks.  Is Zinn one of them?  To what extent is the beautiful Dolores - a Chandleresque siren if ever there was one - involved?  What other murky forces are in play?

Osborne lived on the US-Mexico border around this time and worked as a reporter.  He knows exactly the world he is describing and does it beautifully, without copying Chandler's style but deploying all the key tropes.  Like the best Chandler, the ending is not fully resolved, because these things never are, and because leaving the reader speculating is the best way to go.  I for one was spellbound all the way through.

PS: Banville's continuation Marlowe is Black-Eyed Blonde, written under his Benjamin Black alias and reviewed on this blog way back in 2014.

Night Passage - Robert B Parker

 Night Passage is by the actual Robert B Parker.  Dating from 1999, it is the first of the Jesse Stone series, now being continued by others.  This is the one in which Jesse is sacked by the LAPD because he's taken to drink after the break-up of his marriage to aspiring actress Jenn - to be almost immediately hired as Sheriff of Paradise, Massachusetts, on the other seaboard of the Continent.

Paradise is a sleepy town, and that's the way bank president and head selectman Hasty Hathaway wants it kept. But then Jesse comes upon local muscleman Jo Jo Genest blatantly in breach of his restraining order and makes an enemy.  It starts with graffiti on a police car, then someone kills the police station cat.  Then a local woman is found dead, naked and dumped.  For Paradise, this is a crime wave and questions start being asked about the new sheriff.  To add to the pressure on Jesse, his ex-wife gets in touch just as he is starting a new relationship with the town attorney.

It's a cracking story involving the Boston Mob and local militiamen exercising their constitutional right to bear (and buy) arms.  I liked Parker's panache and attention to detail.  For me, the best bits were the phone conversations between Jesse and his ex.  This was Parker really building his protagonist's character.

Robert B Parker's Payback - Mike Lupica

 Lupica has continued Parker's series about Boston PI Sunny Randall. Parker himself only wrote six of these and what was impressive to me was the depth of the backstory here.  Sunny Randall is connected to the Boston Irish mob through her ex-husband, the Boston Irish cops through her father.  Her wingman Spike is a gay restauranteur.  And the current man in her life is - yes, it's Jesse Stone, perhaps because by the time Payback came out in 2021 Mike Lupica was also writing the Jesse Stone continuation series.

I admit female PIs are not always my first choice for recreational reading, but I took to Sunny straight away.  Lupica has a way with characterisation through dialogue and internal monologue that is very persuasive.

The story here is international money-laundering, Russian mobsters, high stakes poker and frat boy hedge funds - all set against a background of the Covid 19 pandemic.  And, just in passing, while others write novels about the pandemic, Lupica has the skills to make it simply the background.  Because of the pandemic, chancers and gamblers are running out of money and have to take risks, robbing Peter to pay Paul - or, more appropriate in this case, Pyotr and Sergei.

There is bags of action, three interconnected lines of investigation and lots of vivid images of the Boston setting.  I enjoyed it hugely.

Robert B Parker's The Devil Wins - Reed Farrel Coleman

Robert B Parker was a massively successful writer of moderately hardboiled crime fiction series, notably the Spenser series.  His second string, with nine novels, was Jesse Stone.  Doubtless somebody was hired to continue the Spenser series when Parker died in 2010.  Reed Farrel Coleman was the second writer hired to continue the casefiles of Jesse Stone.  This is the second of six continuations thus far.

Coleman is himself the author of successful series.  He has also collaborated with others, including Ulster's own Ken Bruen.  He is, in short, a professional.  He knows what he is doing.

So, Jesse Stone is a former LAPD homicide detective who lost his job because of his drinking.  He moved crosscountry to become local police chief in Paradise, Mass., a commuter town for Boston.  In The Devil Wins an autumn wind reveals three bodies in an abandoned building, two young girls who went missing 25 years earlier, and a fresh John Doe.  A side of Paradise and its history is revealed that Stone knew nothing about.  His righthand woman, Officer Molly Crane, was friends with these girls.  There's a lot of pressure on Stone to solve the case, particularly from the town's elected leaders.  The national media is interested, especially when the mother of one of the girls, a noted sexpot in her day and now married to an elderly millionaire, goes off a cliff minus her panties.

The story really is well done.  The town comes alive with its friendships, alliances, rivalries.  The characters, too, are three-dimensional, expertly layered.  But it's the steady revelation of the mystery that Coleman does so well.  I shall certainly keep my eye out for more of his work.  Who knows, I might even try one of Parker's originals.