Robert B. Parker rebounds with Stranger in Paradise, the best of the three novels I picked up for a buck at the library sale. After turning off my filters, I sat back and enjoyed a good read, a happy reminder of the kind of panache Parker used to produce in his heyday. Yes, it's still merely a novella and, yes, all of the objections I've recited in relation to earlier Parker novellas still apply, but this book has a sort of happy elan to it, a strong pace and a commitment to action that the other two distinctly lacked.

Published this year (2008), Stranger in Paradise features our friend, small-town police chief Jesse Stone, as the protagonist and, thankfully, there is absolutely no sign of Sunny Randall in the book, other than a single brief mention along the way. When an old friend, cold-blooded killer Wilson Cromartie ("Crow"), comes to town with a mysterious mission to perform, Stone and his force go on immediate alert. They tangled with Crow ten years ago, you see, and, before the self-described Apache warrior left town the last time, a lot of people died, including two of the town's boys in blue. Forced by circumstances and their own personality parallels, Stone and Crow soon find themselves working together toward a common goal: saving a rebellious 14-year-old girl from her gangster father and her gangbanger boyfriend while keeping as many other people alive as possible.

Woven into the fabric of this violent storyline are two interesting subplots: a wealthy white neighbourhood's desperate battle to stop a school for underprivileged Hispanic kids from opening in their midsts and Stone's own on-going effort to work out his relationship with his ex-wife Jenn, a beautiful TV investigative reporter who moves back in with him as part of the attempt to take care of the 14-year-old.

This is a violent book — Crow guns down a gangbanger early on in order to prove his own machismo, then picks off two gangster types in cold blood later in the novella while the gangbanger executes the 14-year-old's mother in a brutal development that Stone and his crew treat as a minor inconvenience — but Parker ultimately chickens out when push comes to shove. The climax, once again, is a disappointment, a well-plotted set up where Stone and his force sweep in to arrest all (and I mean ALL) of the perps and their comrades before anything too nasty happens. Even the enigmatic Crow, who loves nothing better than a gun battle, simply fades away into the background during that epic scene, uncharacteristically using the confusion of the developing fire fight between the gangbangers and the gangsters to disappear, rather than to indulge himself in some gratuitous killing.

It's as if Parker got to that point in the writing process and thought: well, I've almost reached my 40,000-word limit and I really don't think I can handle writing such a complicated scene so maybe I won't bother; I'll make it clean and easy, even if it doesn't suit the personalities of the characters I've so carefully created.

Again, I liked this book but with many reservations. I think the plot is stronger and more interesting than the last two Parker novellas I've read but it still plays out as a series of superior, independent men moving effortlessly through a world where no-one else matters. Crow, though interesting in some respects, ultimately fails as nothing more than a negative version of Stone himself. Parker indulges in numerous explications of how and why these two strong, self-contained men can know, understand and respect each other without ever having to spend any time together. They know each other because they are cut from the same cloth; they are each other. Violent, witty, uber-capable, utterly independent, sharing a strong moral code that says, while men are for killin', women are for protectin' and lovin'.

Every woman in the book swoons over Crow, in ways that they wish they could swoon over Stone. Even Molly Crane, the Catholic, mother-of-four, devoted wife who serves as Jesse's right hand on the police force, ends up sleeping with the cold-blooded assassin and convincing herself that this little indulgence of her primal female urges is acceptable since it apparently hurt no one and won't change her relationship with her family. It's a not-too-subtle way for Parker to consummate the erotically charged relationship between Molly and Jesse (Crow's positive alter-ego) without sullying Stone's moral standing.

As in the other Parker books, all characters speak with one voice, in one style, with a similar wit and morality. In fact, Parker appears so incapable of creating anything new in the way of character that the parallels between Stone and Spenser (the protagonist in Parker's earlier books) are blatantly and painfully obvious. Add in Crow, the ultra-capable, cold-blooded, member of a racialised community and Parker has recreated the Spenser/Hawk relationship to the point of idiocy. The one major difference — Spenser was a private eye and Stone is a police officer — actually represents one of the major weaknesses of this new series: whereas Spenser could credibly flout the law when his personal morality required it, Stone either cannot (since he is a cop) or must go to extreme lengths to get around it, leaving the reader shaking her head in disbelief.

Sex is, again, a game to be played and not to be confused with love or intimacy or commitment. Women are objects, littered around the city so that men can either protect them as fragile things of beauty, have sex with them in the on-going game or ignore them and their lives and deaths as unimportant.

it is ironic that, at the centre of this tale is the 14-year-old, Amber, who has already been molested by her father's posse, ignored by her obese, alcohol-abusing mother and forced to have sex with every member of her boyfriend's gang, which boyfriend is then ready and willing to sell her back to her father for $10,000. Stone goes through all this rigamarole to save her from that terrible life and escape into... into... what? A world where women are nothing more than the possessions and sexual playthings of powerful men.

Tags: Parker, Mystery, Stranger In Paradise