New Parker Whodunit Explores Death and Deceit in ‘Paradise’

   DEATH IN PARADISE
   By Robert B. Parker
   G. P. Putnam’s Sons

   Richard Dyer
   The Boston Globe

   Jesse Stone, the police chief in Paradise (Mass.), is having a nice evening. He’s just finished playing a game in the softball league and is sitting around with the guys, tossing back a Lite and talking about sex and baseball, “the best of all possible talk.’’ Then someone calls him. In the lake, floating facedown “was something that used to be a girl.’’
   Stone’s first job is to find out who she is; then he has to find out who put her in the lake. To do that he has to investigate the underbelly of his upscale community and take some trips down to Boston.
   It doesn’t take long to identify the victim as a troubled high school girl named Billie Bishop. Finding out the situation she was in and who killed her is tougher, but both the dramatis personae and the modus operandi will be familiar to readers of earlier books by Robert B. Parker. Some of the bad guys are professionals — the gangster Gino Fish is back, and so is his shooter, Vinnie Morris. They appear as red herrings, because the real bad guys are the amateurs, “respectable’’ people with bad habits, bad attitudes, and a way of trampling on others in order to achieve their bad objectives.
   This is Stone’s third case in Parker’s second series of shamus stories. Stone is a more compelling character than Sunny Randall, heroine of Parker’s third series, and he has rougher edges than the seminal Spenser. This time out, Stone and his issues are more interesting than the case he is working on, which develops predictably.
   Stone has a drinking problem that landed him in Paradise after he messed up on the West Coast; he’s tried nearly every possible response. This time, Parker’s faithful readers will not be surprised to discover, he turns to therapy, and it isn’t easy. Sometimes the therapy scenes in Parker’s novels turn soppy, and Spenser’s unquestioning adoration for the therapist in his life, Susan Silverman, presents an obstacle to some of his readers. Stone’s therapist, Dix, goes in for tough love. He’s a good listener, a better questioner, and an unsparing commentator.
   Stone also has a woman problem. Jenn, his former wife, has come east from Los Angeles to become a television weather forecaster. Finding sex elsewhere isn’t a problem for either of them, but knowing what the other is up to is upsetting for each; she introduces him as her “starter husband.’’
   Stone is a good 30 years younger than Spenser, and every attractive woman who crosses his path immediately signals her availability. In such situations, the chivalrous Spenser always graciously declines; the equally chivalrous Stone usually graciously obliges.
   Jenn and Stone can’t get along together, but they also don’t do too well at keeping apart; there’s attraction and tension in their scenes. (It may be worth noting that “Death in Paradise’’ is the first of Parker’s books not directly dedicated to his wife: It is dedicated to his sons, “who kept their mother going and brought their father home.’’)
   Stone drank before he met Jenn, and she provides a convenient excuse for drinking now. A subplot serves as a scary mirror held up to his own situation. There’s a slimy auto salesman who beats his wife when he gets drunk; the wife never wants to admit this is happening and refuses to press charges. There’s a messy and in some ways incomplete solution to this line of the plot, which becomes more interesting than it appears because of what Stone sees of himself when he looks into this case. He’s not a wife-beater, but he knows what it is like to love someone to desperation.
   Every Parker novel is full of incidental pleasures, and “Death in Paradise’’ is no exception. Local readers will enjoy the real places in the book. There’s a little good cooking; an available high school principal serves “lobster meat in a light cream sauce with sherry, pearl onions and mushrooms and different-colored sweet peppers, over basmati rice’’ to Stone. Cooking, she confides, is “the second best thing I do.’’ There’s some good baseball talk, but what lingers in the memory are Stone’s chapters of inner dialogue. These have the ring of truth; Jesse Stone may have more inner life than any of Parker’s characters.