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.

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.