I guess if they get me I won’t care much.
Haven’t, to my recall, read Parker before. But I enjoyed the JESSE STONE tv movies with Tom Selleck, and I assume the wit in them came from the books. I was quite right – Selleck and his crew clearly loved the books, and the best lines are all to be found on Parker’s pages. I was interested to discover that the Jesse Stone of the books is a good fifteen years younger than Selleck was when he made the films, and I have a new admiration for the careful nature of the tv adaptation. They’re worth watching, not least because they’re shot largely in Canada and therefore access some of the great Canadian character actors of the time – Saul Rubinek, Stephen McHattie and William Devane.
This book reads like butter. I see how they hook people. You almost don’t ask yourself how the embattled police chief of a small town in Massachusetts has time to fuck literally every attractive woman he passes. (Even despite telling everyone who even looks at him that he’s obsessed with his ex-wife.) Despite the smoothness, Parker is a restrained writer. He generally avoids painting on the page, but will occasionally drop in pieces like “the old unlovely snow” to remind you he’s there with his hand on the tiller. Hemingwayan emotional elisions abound, the dialogue is entertaining, Parker knows how to keep a thin and simple plot/counterplot cooking with short punchy scenes, and I always enjoy an open crime story (the COLUMBO style, where we know who the bad guys are almost from the start, and the pleasure is seeing them and the detective trying to outsmart each other).
A fun, easy read for the most part, and I feel better educated by having finally read Parker.