Pun Salad

The ninth, and probably the last, novel written by the late, great, Robert B. Parker in his Jesse Stone series. (But not the last in the series, apparently. See below.)

A thug's body is found in the trunk of his Cadillac Escalade on the scenic causeway in Paradise, Massachusetts (a thinly disgusied Marblehead). Jesse's task here is to discover the perpetrator; he's immediately drawn to the thug's employer, organized crime boss Reggie Galen, who lives in a nice house out on the neck. Coincidentally, Galen lives right next door to another crime boss, Knocko Moynihan. Even more coincidentally (and what might be deemed far-fetched), Knocko and Reggie are married to identical beautiful twin sisters. If you already smell something sordid going on, you're right.

In a parallel case, Boston female PI Sunny Randall has been hired by concerned parents to locate their wayward daughter; she's taken up with a bunch of cultists in Paradise. This naturally involves Jesse as well, and gives them a chance to rekindle their romantic relations from previous books. Cool!

So is this the end for Jesse? Apparently not: Amazon has a page up for Robert B. Parker's Killing the Blues, authored by Michael Brandman, to be released in September of this year. A little poking around reveals that Brandman is a TV writer/producer, most recently for the Jesse Stone series of made-for-TV movies starring Tom Selleck as Jesse.

I'm not sure how I feel about that! Generally, I frown on cynical attempts to squeeze more money from book-buying rubes based on their auto-purchasing affection for a suddenly (um) nonprolific author.

On the other hand, I'd kind of like to know what happens next to Jesse, Sunny, and the various supporting characters.

On the third hand, is it really "what happens next", if it's not Parker telling the story? Hm…