Lupica also returned Jesse to a previous flirtation with Sunny and established them in a relationship of a sort, building on the developments he'd made in his Randall novels. Robert B. Parker himself was rather tediously enamored with relationships in which the principals couldn't be together but couldn't be apart either, and he often wasted a lot of pages on that kind of dance during his novels from the mid-90s forward. Despite a number of straight-up duds, Coleman had added the welcome wrinkle of making Jesse sober, and Lupica continued it.
A land deal in Paradise could mean a lot of money with a casino development, but there's also strong opposition. The mayor counts himself as one of the opposed, but he doesn't have many levers to pull to thwart the third-party sale of the land. Nevertheless, he's thrown every block he can and delayed things long enough so that when he's found dead Jesse has no shortage of suspects. Add in the environmentalist group that may be willing to take extreme measures and the ongoing dissolution of the mayor's marriage, and about the only thing Jesse is sure of in Stone's Throw is that he and his department didn't do it.
Fool's Paradise was a promising debut for Lupica, but Throw unfortunately revives several other things from Parker's own time with Stone that were better left in the past. One is to send Jesse and Sunny back through the relationship spin cycle, this time because she has a relationship she's not sure is as over as she thought it was. As mentioned above, Parker wore this path smooth and here it brings nothing to the story.
Another major blunder is the return of the Native American mob enforcer Wilson Cromartie, or Crow. Parker created the character for 1999's Trouble in Paradise as a part of a heist crew in a weak TV-movie-level story and brought him back in 2008's Stranger in Paradise, an even weaker entry. Jesse's dependable assistant chief Molly Crane inexplicably had a one-night stand with Crow in this second book and Lupica dawdles around with both of them in a couple of viewpoint sequences where they reflect on that time -- Crow wondering what made him desire Molly and Molly wondering whether she can resist a second tryst.
Add these meanderings to a sloppily-built and confusing story -- was this attack made by the first pair of cardboard-cutout thugs or the second one, and what's the point anyway -- and Stone's Throw calls back more to Parker's later and lesser Stone outings than his earlier ones. It's definitely a move away from Coleman's wordy and often fumbling grasp of Paradise and its people, but not necessarily in the right direction.
3 comments:
Thanks for keeping me up-to-date on the Parkerverse.
It was Stranger in Paradise that put me off on Parker books for the first part. The evolution of adultery in Parker's books from something to be forgiven to something that was good really warped any sense of Code that they really stopped talking about.
I could never figure out why he made both of his secondary series captive to the same dysfunctional relationship. I got that he modeled Spenser and Susan's on his own together-but-apart arrangement in his own life, but Sunny's interactions with Richie and Jesse's with Jenn might as well have been a pasted-in macro. Just about the only good thing that Coleman did was to excise Jenn from the Stone series in a more or less permanent arrangement, but now I'm wondering if Lupica will decide to reignite that dumpster fire as well.
And Crow is just about one of the laziest characters Parker ever put to paper -- if you're going to add a morally ambiguous but personally honorable shadow side to your protagonist again, Bob, could you at least not name this one after a bird?
The books kept selling, so he must have thought that those very things drove it instead of buyers' habits.
Post a Comment