Immortality's Ups and Downs

Several of the ghostwritten works which keep Robert B. Parker's characters alive after the author himself passed away in 2010 have been noted in this space, and generally Ace Atkins' work with Parker mainstay Spenser have earned the highest marks. Rather than try to write like his late predecessor, Atkins apparently chose to try to write the characters and so produced recognizable versions of them.

For the most part, 2015's Kickback follows in that trend, although Atkins seems to suffer from a continuity lapse or two that makes some of the supporting cast come off oddly. Spenser is hired by a woman whose son was sent to a hardened juvenile detention facility for a fairly minor prank. The no-nonsense judge who sentenced him seems to have a habit of that kind of draconian punishment and the woman thinks her son and other kids are being mistreated out of line with their crimes. Spenser, as his wont, uncovers more than just a bullying judge misusing his authority, as he and his friend Hawk wind up taking on organized crime outfits that have an unusual interest in keeping a tough judge on his bench. They'll defend their interests in their usual way, though, meaning that Spenser and Hawk will need to be about the toughest men in Boston in order to see the case through and survive. Fortunately, they probably are just that.

Atkins has come the closest of any of Parker's successors to getting his ear for zippy dialogue and has firmly grasped Spenser as knight in tarnished armor, touched more than a little by the seamy world in which he has to work but unbowed in the strength of his convictions and desire to see the right thing done. He continues to do so, but Kickback's versions of both Boston Police investigator Frank Belson and mobster Vinnie Morris ring more false than true. Belson owes Spenser for the safe recovery of his wife but here acts as if the private investigator is part of the problem. Morris doesn't seem a good fit as a mob boss instead of a gunman, but that thread may continue to develop.

A bigger problem is the way Atkins wants his book to be an indictment of private prison companies and the corruption that plagues the industry. There's certainly a good case to be made on those counts, but Kickback's ham-handed treatment lacks only a mustache-twirl or two to be straight-up silent-movie melodrama.

The bungled characterizations and political cartoon plot ultimately hamstring Atkins' fourth Spenser novel. More than either of its three predecessors, Kickback has the air of 90s-00s Parker works that had flashes of style but not much else.

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Reed Farrel Coleman has a problem. He's got the job of continuing one of the other Parker series that the publisher and Parker's estate considered bankable, stories about Paradise, Mass., police chief Jesse Stone. Part of the problem is that Parker created Jesse at about the time he was entering a professional doldrum of cut-and-paste segments, uninspired storytelling and putting on paper stuff that truly tested a fan's resolve.

Only two or three Stone novels were all that good, and the character simply doesn't have strong definition. Spenser has Hawk, Susan, Belson and Quirk, the city of Boston and several other people and places against which he can be seen and measured. Jesse has a couple of reoccurring subordinates but a rotating cast of girlfriends and a city that morphs and develops new neighborhoods and people as each new novel needs them.

Coleman's other problem is that his style differs wildly from Parker. His Shamus Award-winning Moe Prager novels focus on the gregarious central character and use a voice that matches his loquacious manner. A loquacious Parker character is one who speaks more than three sentences at a time. This means that whatever hazy form Parker had been able to give Jesse Stone has very little overlap with the one Coleman sets forth. In a note about Coleman's first Stone novel I said these are characters with the same names but seem almost nothing like the people we've met.

The Devil Wins starts out by trying to work around that problem, by demonstrating how we're seeing the same characters but with a different eye, and Coleman has some success. But the indistinctness of Paradise and its people mean he can't keep it up. The story, about how the discovery of a recent murder victim leads to a much older crime that directly affects some of the people to whom Jesse is closest, doesn't help much. Coleman lifts a large part of its engine and pieces from his 2005 Prager novel The James Deans and spends the second two-thirds of the novel telling us things about Jesse and what he's thinking that Parker would have showed us with a bit of dialogue or pithy description.

Not being as good a writer as Robert B. Parker is no crime; if it were then there would be about seven billion people in jail and a couple of people too busy writing to watch them. But The Devil Wins is not only a sub-par version of Parker, it's a sub-par version of Reed Farrel Coleman and its negatives mean it never gets going anywhere.