Killing the Blues

July 18, 2011
Brandman, who collaborated with Robert B. Parker (1932â2010) on TV adaptations of his work, perfectly reproduces Parker's style in this impressive continuation of his series featuring Paradise, Mass., police chief Jesse Stone. A series of auto thefts is plaguing the small Massachusetts town just as the profitable summer tourist season is about to kick off. More alarmingly, Stone's former boss with the LAPD, Captain Cronjager, phones to warn him that a criminal Stone once roughed up "pretty good," Rollo Nurse, has been paroled from California's Lompoc prison due to budget cuts and may come gunning for him. The ending may tie up loose ends a little too neatly, and Stone is a bit slow off the mark with one of his professional challenges, but as with the originals, the pleasure lies more in the easy, banter-filled writing, balanced with the lead's apparently limitless compassion, informed by bitter experience, than in the plot itself.

August 1, 2011

Now that summer's here, the advent of the tourist season brings the same old crime-based problems to idyllic Paradise, Mass., but now at the hands of a different author.

Has anything changed since the death last year of series creator Robert B. Parker? Not really. Police chief Jesse Stone still misses his girlfriend Sunny Randall (Split Image, 2010, etc.), off in Europe on a job. Dispatcher/receptionist Molly Crane still gives him a hard time over his requests for coffee and monosyllabic responses to her questions. When somebody starts stealing cars from the streets of Paradise, Jesse's take-charge reaction is still the same. He shows the same omni-sensitive side when 14-year-old Lisa Barry holds her school principal hostage at gunpoint to protest her bullying by the Lincoln Village girls, and the same reliable intuition when he hears that Rollo Nurse, whose skull he fractured while arresting him in L.A. years ago, is out of prison and may be looking for him. He's still catnip to women like Alexis Richardson, who got the job of organizing and publicizing summer events through her uncle, selectman Carter Hansen. He still wrestles with the bottle, shares confidences with his therapist and cleans up his town with his usual laconic aplomb. The only differences are his new rental place right on the bay; Mildred Memory, a cat who finds him equally irresistible; and the unconvincing voices that bid the worst of the bad guys to do the bad things he does.

Film and TV producer Brandman, who collaborated on several of Jesse's TV adaptations, obviously believes that no news is good news. Series fans will probably agree.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

April 1, 2011

With summer just weeks away, Chief of Police Jesse Stone is pretty tense--and not just because Paradise, MA, is gearing up for the tourists. Stone finds himself dealing with car thefts, then murder, then someone who's come to town to remind him of his not-so-happy past as an L.A. cop. Fans mourning Parker's death will be happy to see that Brandman, who has written and produced numerous TV movies based on Parker's novels, has picked up where the best-selling author left off.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2011
There's something unseemly and exploitative about this book's cover, which has Robert B. Parker emblazoned at the top, in the largest letters, with the actual author, Michael Brandman, presented in small print at cover's bottom. It's an obvious attempt to fool fans into buying the book, hoping that Parker, who died last year, left one behind. Brandman, a Parker collaborator (on the Spenser and Jesse Stone TV series), may be a talented author in his own right (and this mystery reads at least as well as Parker's unusually terse Stone books), but he isn't Parker. What the novel does have going for it, however, is a mystery that builds to a very satisfying and shocking resolution. Stone, the police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts, is beset by a string of car thefts during tourist season. Then a car owner is murdered. The dialogue often consists of one-word paragraphs, a device that gets old really quickly. The Stone series, as written by Parker, was always a cut below the Spenser series. Brandman's effort, if read on its own merits, is strong on plotting but derivative on everything else.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)