Trouble In Paradise-A Jesse Stone Novel By Robert B. Parker-A Review 

Book Review

By Sam Lowell

High Profile, Robert B. Parker, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York,2007  

Funny what will turn up on your summer reading list and why. Sure I am like any other heated, roasted urban dweller and am looking for a little light reading to while away the summer doldrums. Most days I review high-toned literary masterpieces or squirrelly little historical books fit for the academy. But those kinds of books cannot survive the summer siege. Which brings us to the book under review, one of Robert B. Parker’s Police Chief Jesse Stone series, High Profile.  Or rather I will bring us to the book under review after I go through a little of how I came to read this book. How I came to read yet another a crime novel for crying out loud. That is not as condescending as it sounds since long ago I learned the very hard lesson that serious crime writers like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Nelson Algren, Ross MacDonald and a few others, had earned their places in the American literary canon. Their hard-bitten sparse dialogues and plotlines were worthy of emulation, or if not that then a thoroughgoing serious read.

That is how in a roundabout way we get to this book. See, as I have mentioned elsewhere of late in reviewing some other Parker-etched books every year when the doldrums come I automatically reach for a little Chandler or Hammett from my library to see the real deal, to see how the masters worked their magic, in order to spruce up (and parse, if possible) my own writing. This year when I did so I noticed a book Poodle Spring by Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker. This final Philip Marlowe series book was never finished by Chandler before he died in 1959. Parker finished it up in 1989. Robert B. Parker, of course, had been a name known to me as the crime novel writer of the Spenser series of which I had read several of the earlier ones before moving on to others interests. While checking up on what Parker, who died in 2010, had subsequently written I noticed another Chandler-Parker collaboration Perchance To Dream: Robert B. Parker’s Sequel To Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Since I was on a roll, was being guided by the ghost of Raymond Chandler maybe, I decided to check out what turned out to be Parker’s last Spenser effort, Sixkill. And because we still have several weeks left of summer and crime novels have the virtue of not only being easy on the brain in the summer heat but quick reads I figured to play out my hand a little and read a few other Parker works. Now we are all caught up on genesis.

Frankly Police Chief Jesse Stone’s tales are not as interesting to me as the early Spenser pieces. Although they share many of the same attributes, clever, intrepid, resourceful, seeking some smidgen of rough justice in this wicked old world (characteristics of hard-boiled windmill chasers they share along with Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, the godfather along with Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade) I  couldn’t get excited about his character. His past as a broken down (meaning a drunk) former homicide detective in the sprawling LAPD moving to a small town post, his incessant attention to an ex-wife whom he can’t get out of his mind (which provides a weird subplot involving that ex-wife and his current girlfriend in the book under review) and his working the other side of the street (professional cop) has left me cold. Just personal preference in crime novel heroes, okay.

In High Profile we get to see him in action in his little bailiwick of Paradise (that’s a small imaginary town in seacoast Massachusetts, seemingly on the North Shore up Cape Ann way which given the number of books in the series by Parker and later writers was something like the murder capital of the world), managing his small corps of officers, through the travails of yet another big time case, a vicious murder case. The high profile part comes in because the murder, or better murders, are connected to the death of big time nationally known talk show host, Walter Walker, and his pregnant assistant and mistress Cary. The bizarre nature of the murders, the talk show host shot and then hung from a tree and the mistress also shot found in back of a restaurant dumpster had Stone and his minions perplexed especially when no respective relatives expressed any great anguish over the deaths.

As the plot unfolds though there are certainly reasons why somebody would want to murder that talk show host, and through him that mistress. See our boy Walker was married, very married, wife number three married, to a dish, Lottie, beautiful but ruthless from nowhere, who had divorced her ex-copper husband turned Walker personal bodyguard, Conrad, to marry him. That ex-husband though strangely remained as Walker’s bodyguard throughout the marriage. Something should smell fishy in that combination right away. The solving of this one got into high gear though as Stone and his gang connect the dots. Stone found out that Walker was going to marry that pregnant mistress. Also found out that Lottie was still seeing her ex on the side (as well as Walker’s chief researcher) that Lottie got around) and found out that there were still a million reasons why Conrad (and Lottie) needed the deceased pair out of the way. Greed, as usual, and hatred when Conrad on what amounted to his death bed confession told Chief Stone the whole sordid plan (an overkilled plan with that tree business and having the bodies refrigerated to throw the cops off) that he AND Lottie had worked out once the meal ticket looked like it was going to run out. Naturally the warrior Conrad as he took Stone’s waiting bullets after the confession when the deal went down did so to keep his sweet viper Lottie away for serious jail time. So, as it turned out Conrad and Jesse were brethren, were love addled to the nth degree. Ouch. I’ll though take any already read Spenser tale and his healthy thing with Susan anytime over this overwrought tale.