A Robert B Parker – Jesse Stone book
Reed Farrel Coleman is a good writer!
I’m just ten pages in, but he sure can paint a picture!
Also, turns out I’ve been here before!
I have reviewed a Parker-Coleman-Stone novel here before:
The Bitterest Pill.
Re-reading that review made me to check my Workflowy site, where I’ve entered every book I’ve read for at least the last 12 years, and indeed I have read this current book before also … in December 2016 according to my list.
- That was the 6 book in the Jesse Stone series, this is the second.
- Jesse has stopped drinking in that one.
He’s deep in his struggles in this one. - — That one was a terribly sad story of a cheerleader who died of a Fentanyl overdose.
— This one is a terribly sad story of the murder of two little girls who were best buds with deputy Stone when they disappeared.
If you’re looking for happy times find another author I guess. 🙂
Jesse’s On the Job
Onward to this book!
A late-fall Nor’easter has come to Paradise.
As you might know, Paradise is the whimsically named fictional seaside New England village where our hero Jesse Stone has been the Sheriff for a few years. This is at least the 14th Jesse Stone novel (counting the original Parkers), so it’s well established who he is and how he got there.
This night Jesse is just doing his Sherrif’s thing, cruising around the town checking up on everything since there’s a big violent storm happening.
- We get a short meditation on the difference between western storms (Tuscon / LA) vs New England storms.
- I thought the prose descriptions were very nice.
- We get little thumbnails on some citizens who are also out in this crazy weather:
- 2 The Fire Chief, who Jesse thinks is an asshole.
- 3 He waves at a gruff Portagee fisherman who is too gruff to wave back. 🙂
- He helps a an insurance fellow named Marchand, who he thinks is a good guy, get his storm shutters up
- 4 Jessie stops a fellow named Millner, who he knows is a crook, skulking around a building clearly with the notion of to stealing stuff in the confusion.
- During most of this time, he is thinking pretty constantly about getting home to that first drink of the evening.
- The sub-theme of this book is Jesse tip-toeing around the edges of going into recovery.
- I know this because he talk our ears off about it the whole book.
- A few pages later he’s at home and we get a loving, detailed description of his drinking rituals.
- I’m not much of a whiskey guy myself, but everybody in Paradise MA sure is into it!
It turns out that these little thumbnails were not just introductory local color. Each one is a character that turns up multiple times later in the book!
We meet some bad guys
6 In the next chapter unnamed locals are finishing up murdering a former friend (named Zevon) and disposing of the evidence (his body).
It’s pretty ugly. It seems that Zevon found Jesus came back to town to encourage his old buddies to own up to an old crime, … so they killed him.
11 Bad luck for the criminals, the abandoned warehouse where they got together to torture and kill this poor guy collapsed during the storm, so the body is discovered a lot sooner than they planned.
The Fire Chief shows up and is indeed a misogynist jerk.
22 When they finally get the debris of the collapsed shed off the pit where the dead guy was spotted, to their horror the next pit over appears to contain the skeletons of two little girls.
These are Mary Kate O’Hara and Ginny Connolly, who disappeared years ago. Instantly, things get really tense around the station.
- The dead girls were best 10th-grade buddies with Jesse’s deputy Molly.
- Among the many questions Jesse has, is why had he never heard of this case before?
- 23 The girls went off Fourth of July events back in the day and never were seen again.
- 27 Mary Kate:
- smaller of the two, more cute than pretty, but a real firecracker …
- and Molly’s best friend.
- Ginny Connoly:
- tall and blond, would have been beautiful if she lived.
- 27 Mary Kate:
- Both were good athletes.
40 Jesse goes to the Medical Examiner’s for the autopsy of the current dead guy.
- 43 His face is smashed up so bad they can’t identify him, but there is a pretty distinct tattoo under his left arm.
44 Jesse and Molly call on Mary Kate’s mom, Tess O’Hara. She’s a mess.
[When this book starts Jesse obsessing drinking, but he is not obsession about any particular woman as he usually is in these books. He fills in by obsessing about his ex-wive Jenn (old reliable) but otherwise doesn’t know what to do in this situation. He seizes on Tamara Elkins, the ME as a possible romantic partner. I find this pretty annoying.]
We meet more bad guys
56 A couple of the as yet unidentified bad guys get together in a seedy bar in the seedy part of Paradise.
The guy from page 6 is NOT one of these guys, because one is bitching incessantly about page 6 guy’s choice to put their friend’s body next to where they had stashed the girls years ago.
Somewhat ominously, the other guy calls yet one more guy to say “I think we have a problem”.
Maxie Connolloy returns
68 Mary Kat’s mom was in the same old house where she was when they disappeared, but Ginny’s mom got married to a rich guy and lest.
She is still a real sexy woman. She devoted her life to marrying and divorcing rich guys. She flies bak to town with her latest husband (who was a real sympathetic character!) and Jesse meets her.
Molly despises her.
82 Well, that didn’t take long! We just met her, and now she’s murdered! She meets her boyfriend from the old days (“Loverboy”) at the Bluffs, a scenic overlook that was their special place then.
They have a passionate embrace and he snaps her neck.
Breaking necks creeps me out more than most gory things in these books, so I won’t dwell on it, but it only took three pages and it’s done … and she’s done.
Irresistible Jesse …
87 I’ve already expressed my annoyance about fine women throwing themselves at Jesse, well, right on cue it happens again!
Tamara Elkins shows up at his door with a bottle of whiskey. They have lots of witty talk, but in the end, she stays over but in the spare bedroom rather than Jesse’s room because Jesse is still holding a candle for someone named Diane.
This mollified me a bit, since we won’t have to endure a new romance. 🙂
A body on the rocks
A lot of ths book happens with people getting their business done while sipping an whiskey on the rocks. Well now he have a dead body on the rocks!
96 The next morning Jesse and Tamara each get an alert on their phones that an early morning jogger has spotted a body on the rocks beneath the Bluffs.
It develops soon enough that it is Maxie Connolly body. Pretty much everybody thinks it’s suicide since she’s was so surprisingly upset about coming back for her daughter’s remains.
106 Everybody thinks it’s suicide except Jesse and her surprisingly sympathetic husband who says no way she killed herself.
136 Jesse and Molly drive to Boston to talk to the guy who saw the girls in a rowboat going to Stiles Island way back in the day.
139 A new chapter, and we are back inside the head of the guy that killed Maxie. By the Rule of Whodunits, which I just made up, must be somebody we met earlier in the book, so we can’t clain to be completely blindsided when he is revealed.
We haven’t really met that many people, so I think the pleasant insurance fellow from page 3, named Bill Marchand, is gonna be the homicidal guy that has not yet been identified.
143 Next chapter: Jesse makes Molly spill the beans about why every mention of Stiles Island makes her pause and stare into space.
Turns out it’s where the kids went to smoke pot and make out!
I wish we had an island to go to when I was in high school! 🙂
148 Next chapter: Back with the bad guys again.
There are at least three of them, because the speaker asks “Which one of you shot Zevon?”
They are meeting at the maintenance shed of Sacred Heart Girls Catholic, just as they had the night Zevon was murdered.
The bad-attitude fisherman, Alexio, is I think a fourth conspirator. He was the guy on page 56 that the other guy was “worried about”.
155 Next chapter: The guy who killed Maxie who was NOT I think one of the guys from the last chapter gets accosted by the sleazeball cabby (named Wiethop) who drove Maxie to the Bluffs. Since none of these people have names yet, it’s kinda hard to keep track.
164 Jesse is watching the funeral service of Ginny Connolly, and Marchand, insurance man and town Selectman, turns up. He sure turns up a lot.
166 Wiethop the cabby did not showup for work today so Jesse and Suit go to his apartment. They find Maxie’s missing suitcase under the bad … almost like it was put there for them to find it!
184 Jesse decides to have a press conference to stir things up. He drops hints that DNA was found on the blanket that the girls were wrapped in..
192 Marchand turns up at Jesse office AGAIN! Wants a drink as always. The official reason he’s there is to convey the Town Council’ eagerness to get this thing wrapped up, but it’s starting to get pretty obvious that he also is probing for information on what Jesse knows.
Murderers meet again
199 There are three of them.
- Alexio the fisherman
- John Millner, who we met on page 3.
He works in the maintenance shed at Sacred Heart. - The third is the unnamed narrator.
We get a short summary of what was supposed to happen back then:
Zevon and the narrator and the two girls were gonna row out to the island and have big fun. ut Zevon backed out which somehow started an unfortunate chain of events…
208 Turns out part of Molly’s guilt is that she and her best friend Mary Kate were weren’t speaking at that time because they were fighting over a boy named Warren.
His real name was Warren Zebriski, but everybody called him Zevon :).
209 Everybody’s phones go off at once because there are TWO house fires! Mary Kate’s house AND Ginny’s house are both torched!
Jesse’s little press conference got some results!
219 Sadly though, Jesse’s favorite candidate for the villian, Alexio did not do it. The Staties were shadowing him and he didn’t go near there.
A new person appears
Recall early in the book, that body they found that led to the discovery of the girs bodys, had a very distinctive tattoo on it.
Some dude had called the station from a motel outside Tuscon in the middle part of the book saying he knew who belonged to the tattoo, but they couldn’t trace him.
222 Well, that dude is on a bus to Paradise! He’s got a pretty bad case of PTSD. He’s barely functional.
He can’t remember where he woke up that morning, but his military reflexes are still top-notch, because In New York City a couple of guys try to roll him and he messes them up pretty good before the police step in.
Police work!
Things are happening!
A white van had been seen near both houses that got torched . At the same time the police are figuring out that John Millner has a white van, Millner is calling the police station to report his van as stolen!
Dumb criminal who think they re smart …
233 So Suit and Jesse head out to the Sacred Heart maintenance shed where they find Millner sharpening a mower blade.
Surprise, he’s an asshole.
241 Surprise again, Marchand turns up in Jesse’soffice again. Again the official reason is to pressure Jesse to make the case go away, but it’s clear he also wants info on the case.
243 Marchand is in Jesse’s office when they get a call from the NYPD about this Afghan vet from 20 pages ago! I suspect this little coincidence is going to matter!
252 Millner and the unnamed guy get on Alexio’s boat, I think to go out and drop their various weapons in the ocean.
255 What they’re really there for is for Person X to shoot Alexio then stab Millner and leave blood everywhere and a (typed!) confession note saying that only the two of them did it then killed each other.
262 The PTSD vet is named Jameson. Suit is escorting him from the squad car and the station and a mystery van tries to run him over.
271 Marchand comes to visit Suit in the hospital, and Jesse STILL does not suspect him (or at least acts like it)
275 Recap:
- Jameson was heroin buddies with the guy that was killed in the first pages.
- That guy turned out to be Zevon: the tall, handsome fellow that Molly and Mary Kate were fighting over
- Molly won him by giving it up and sleeping with him.
- 279 The night of the murder she was in fact sleeping with him.
- Which was why he wasn’t on rowboat to the island.
- Presumable the murders would not have happened if he’s come as planned.
- So NOW we know why she feels so guilty.
- Zevon had been carrying a picture of him and Molly all these years. We think he gave it to Jameson for safe keeping before he came back to Paradise to get murdered by his old buddies.
296 Coast Guard finds the fishing boat, and soon the bodies wash up on the shore of an island.
298 The boat is covered in blood, and there is a typed confession from Millner. It says …
- He and Alexio killed the girls.
- They were having fun with Ginny, but Mary Kate wouldn’t put out.
- It was supposed to be just him and Ginny
- but Ginny wouldn’t go without Mary Kay,
- Mary Kay wouldn’t go until they lied and said Zevon was coming.
- They get out there and there’s no Zevon, then Alexio tries to force MK,
- Ginny tries to stop him (Alexio).
- MK knees him in the groin.
- Alexio stabs her like 20 times.
- So somebody naturally has to kill Ginny also.
- Next summer Zevon comes home from college and genius here confesses to him.
- Then this summer, Zevon and Jameson are doing herion together in the desert and have found God together!
- So Zevon comes home to tell is homicidal old friends that they need to get right with God and confess for the sake of their souls.
- They kill him instead.
309 Jesse goes to the Sacred Heart Boys Catholic library to look at old yearbook pictures.
He finds exactly what we’ve all been waiting for, namely that Bill Marchand was the point guard (i.e. the brains 🙂 off the basketball team that year, along with Zevon and all the other dumb-asses who have been funbling throught this whole book.
312 He has Marchand come to the office where he sets him up.
I’m kinda over the play by play. Jesse set him up to riddle a pile of pillow with bullets, and that’s how he gets busted.
337 There are a few postscript pages where it turns out the Maxie’s killer was none those cretins, it was the kindly newspaper guy Stu Cromwell, for reasons that I find too depressing to even talk about. It’s still hard for me to integrate my image of Stu Cromwell into being Maxie’s Loverboy!
the end