Pun Salad

Since Robert B. Parker passed away last month, I read this with an extra twinge of poignancy: There won't be many more unread Parker books, and you're reading one of the last.

This appears to be the next-to-last novel in his Jesse Stone series. Jesse's still the police chief in Paradise, MA, and he's still tottering on the edge of alcoholic self-destruction, due to his devotion to trampy ex-wife Jenn. But (fortunately for the reader) he has other problems: a local school principal has inexplicably held a pre-dance panty inspection for the girls in her charge. (It doesn't help that the principal is married to a politically well-connected lawyer.) One of the girls, impressed with Jesse, asks him to investigate a swingers' club that her parents frequent. And (finally) there's a peeping tom afoot in town, and he's threatening to escalate his tactics.

Not too much detecting going on here: Jesse pretty much has the primary bad guy handed to him on a platter. There is a lot of shrink-talk about the nature of obsession, with an indirect parallel made between the peeper's need to look at nekkid ladies, and Jesse's attachment to Jenn. That can be tedious. Our favorite lady detective from Boston, Sunny Randall, reappears in Jesse's life, and helps him (apparently) make some progress in his personal life.