ROBERT B. PARKER – Stone Cold. Putnam, hardcover, September 2003. Reprint paperback: Berkley, September 2004.
The fourth in Parker’s series featuring transplanted L.A. cop Jesse Stone finds Jesse faced with a pair of cold-blooded serial killers (is there any other kind?) in Paradise, a small New England town where Stone is the police chief, and which has the promise (at least since his arrival) of developing into a typical Murder Town, U.S.A.
Jesse is still in love with his ex-wife and seeing other women, trying to sort out his conflicting emotions with the help of a laconic psychiatrist, and committed to his job that offers a fresh challenge in each novel.
I had thought the thrill-killer as a subject of mystery novels was pretty well worn out, but Parker gives it a good run, although I didn’t read this as carefully as I have some Parker novels.
VAL McDERMID – The Torment of Others. St. Martin’s, hardcover, April 2005; paperback, August 2006.
McDermid’s series featuring criminal psychologist Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan has generated a BBC series that is inferior to the novels, and I just realized that three episodes from the most recent series on BBCAmerica are sitting unwatched on my DVD-R hard drive.
I have to admit that Tony Hill wears less well as a character than Carol Jordan (and I find this true of the TV series as well). However, McDermid seems to have found a pattern that pleases many readers as a brilliant, psychotic serial killer tests the skills of the police and consultant Hill.
I only wish that each successive novel didn’t seem less fresh than the preceding one.
JANET EVANOVICH – Ten Big Ones. St. Martin’s, hardcover, June 2004; paperback, June 2005.
In her tenth appearance, Stephanie Plum becomes the target of a hit man when she antagonizes a Trenton NJ street gang.
She spends a fair amount of time hiding out in the plush hideaway of her would-be boyfriend and super bounty hunter Ranger, getting turned on by sleeping in his bed and feeling guilty because she’s “unfaithful” to her other would-be (and more often than not her actual) boy-friend, Vice Cop Joe Morelli.
Usual loony bunch of characters, and a now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t plot line that more or less keeps things afloat.