Michael Brandman is no forger. He was specifically selected by the Robert B. Parker estate to continue writing Parker's character Jesse Stone, the police chief of Paradise, Massachussetts. In a way, that robs him even of the forger's greatest reward -- a work indistinguishable from the original -- because everyone knows he's not the original. His highest achievement would be a tepid, "I couldn't even tell it wasn't the real guy."
And for Brandman's first outing with Stone in book form, Killing the Blues, he doesn't earn that. There is no sense that, absent the apostrophe "s" on the cover, a reader would say, "Did I just read a lost Parker manuscript?" Brandman, a television producer and writer, collaborated with Parker and Tom Selleck on the first Jesse Stone TV movies, and later just with Selleck when the movies began to tell stories not in the books. Parker was pleased with their work, but Brandman's TV limitations show up from the first page of Blues and never really go away.
Jesse and the town of Paradise are getting ready for the summer tourist season. An ambitious -- and beautiful -- event planner is ready to bring thousands of visiting dollars to town with some big-name concerts. The council hired several police officers to help keep things orderly during the summer. But a car-theft ring has picked out Paradise as a new area of operations and the council wants that stopped, fast. Plus, a man Jesse arrested and beat up when he was a Los Angeles police officer on the edge of an alcoholic breakdown is out of prison and may be headed to Paradise for revenge.
If you think this sounds like it would make a better TV movie than a book, you're right. Brandman's non-novel Jesse Stone movies added TV melodrama to the character that Parker's novels neither had nor needed (with the exception of the silly Trouble in Paradise and sillier Strangers in Paradise), and the TV melodrama is all over Blues. Brandman has an echo of Parker's ear for dialogue, and that's where he's able to come closest to capturing what made Parker's best work so good. Even if the words the characters say sound like what Parker's characters would say, "sound like" is as good as it gets, and it doesn't get there very often. The action, description and other non-dialogue story elements don't come close -- they read like someone took Parker's characters, wrote a story about them and then had someone who knew Parker's style try unsuccessfully to polish them into it.
Brandman throws out the possible romance Jesse started with Sunny Randall, a female private investigator Parker wrote a few books about but whose series had died out in 2007. Whether or not this was a good decision -- Parker had just paired them up again in his final Stone novel, Split Image -- it's handled poorly as an offscreen event relayed through clumsy exposition. Brandman has characters say and do things against their established roles and ignores series continuity more than once.
The problem with having another author continue a series with his or her own ideas, rather than filling out an already-written outline like Brandon Sanderson is doing with Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, is the question: Why does this moke get to write his vision of these people instead of me? If the book is very very good, that fanbase might be mollified. But Blues will soothe next to no one who figures their ideas for Stone and Paradise, their ability to adopt a Parkerish voice or even their basic abilities as writers are just as good as or better than what we've been given. Blues could have caught a break for not being Parker if it had been good, but it barely manages meh.
Mystery writer Ace Atkins will be taking up the Spenser novels starting next year, and expectations for his work are probably higher. Parker's last couple of Spensers were much better in quality than the series had been for years, and Atkins has a pretty good track record of his own for fine detective novel work. Brandman should have had the easier at-bat because of his familiarity with the Stone character and the lackadaisical quality of the last several Stone novels, but Killing the Blues is at best a foul tip -- and at that maybe a foul tip called by the umpire instead of seen by anyone else on the field.
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