Pun Salad

I've settled into a reasonable compromise on buying the works of Mr. Robert B. Parker: get the Spenser novels in hardcover, wait for the others in paperback. So this one showed up last week, and I gobbled it up. It's last year's installment in the series following the police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts, Jesse Stone.

Gripe: it's one of those newfangled tall paperbacks, nearly seven and a half inches as opposed to the standard slightly-under 6 and a half inches. This will raise hell with my book storage! Oh well…

It's good, of course. With Parker, it's interesting to look at how his series characters develop. Spenser has long since settled down past any turmoil in his personal life; he knows himself, he knows pretty much how his relationship with Susan Silverman works. They chat a lot, but we're pretty sure they're going to wind up in the same place at the end of the book as they were at the beginning.

Jesse, on the other hand, is still trying to figure out (a) his drinking; (b) his relationship with his ex-wife Jess. It promises to play out for awhile.

But there's a mystery, too! An unknown woman is found floating in the harbor, in the middle of "Race Week" when a lot of out-of-towners show up looking for pleasures licit and illicit. It turns out that the victim is involved with a lot of the latter. Fortunately, Jesse and his team are almost certainly among the most dogged detectives anywhere. Elvis Cole may be the World's Greatest Detective, but Jesse's probably up there in the top ten.

According to RBP's "blog" at Amazon, the movie based on Sea Change will air on CBS May 20. Tom Selleck returns to his role as Jesse. I think Tom Selleck is great, but I "see" Kevin Spacey as Jesse, myself.