I like the fact that Parker chose to write about a character much different from Spenser and yet much the same.

I never bothered to read any of the Jesse Stone novels as long as I had a new Spenser by Parker to look forward to, but now that Parker has passed on, I decided to no longer leave the first Stone unturned. On to the rest of the series! (Ebooks available on line from the otherwise shuttered Columbus Metropolitan Library.) So I guess the coronavirus is good for something. I felt I was seeing a more vulnerable side of Parker, the way he must have felt during the painful period when he and his wife Joan were living apart. I liked the way it explored Stone's wounded vulnerability, exposed by his wife's affair. This time I enjoyed Night Passage even more. So I decided to read a book I read more than seven years ago as a renewed introduction to a series of books by one of my favorite authors: the Jesse Stone series by Robert B. Now that I'm sheltering in place, my movements limited by the threat of the coronavirus, I find I require familiar pleasures to compensate for my loss of familiar places and faces. Promised Land and the other Spenser novels spawned the movie Spenser: For Hire and a string of made-for-TV movies. Parker's acclaim and his thorough background in classic detective literature helped earn him the somewhat unusual commission of completing a Philip Marlowe novel that the great Raymond Chandler had left unfinished. Best known for his portrayal of the tough but erudite investigator Spenser, Parker wrote over twenty-five novels over the course of his career, which began in 1973. Parker was one of contemporary fiction's most popular and respected detective writers. The Spenser novels have been cited by critics and bestselling authors such as Robert Crais, Harlan Coben and Dennis Lehane as not only influencing their own work but reviving and changing the detective genre. Parker was 77 when he died of a heart attack at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts discovered at his desk by his wife Joan, he had been working on a novel. His works incorporate encyclopedic knowledge of the Boston metropolitan area. ABC television network developed the television series Spenser: For Hire based on the character in the late 1980s a series of TV movies based on the character were also produced. His most famous works were the novels about the private detective Spenser. Robert Brown Parker was an American crime writer.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database named Robert B.

Night passage jesse stone book