Booze and pills and bullets, oh my

Reed Farrel Coleman has been doing a nice job continuing the adventures of the late Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone character, and the newest Stone book, Robert B. Parker's The Bitterest Pill, keeps that track record going.  This time out, Jesse, the police chief of the seaside resort town of Paradise, Massachusetts, has to confront murder and violence stemming from the opioid crisis, while at the same time getting acquainted with the grown son Jesse has only recently discovered existed. Oh, and the chief is also seriously confronting his drinking problem for the first time. And while juggling all this Jesse enters into a new romantic relationship.  It's a busy book.

With all this going on, though, the book never feels crowded or overstuffed, just pleasantly moves along in a breezy, involving fashion with everything getting the right amount of attention.  The alcoholism plotline is particularly interesting, as it veers off from what Robert Parker would have probably done.  Parker seemed to believe that a person's weaknesses and demons had to be managed and co-existed with, rather than eliminated.  Under Parker's watch, Jesse never gave up his problem drinking or his obsession with his ex-wife Jenn, only got enough help to keep those things enough under control so that he could do his job and live his life.  That approach provided a lot of complex, involving reading over the years, but I'm also enjoying Coleman's more blunt method: in recent books, Jesse has given up his preoccupation with Jenn and has made a kind of productive peace with her, and, in The Bitterest Pill, Jesse goes the full AA route after some tentative steps in the previous novel.  And it's all very interesting, and no less complex than Parker's approach.

The crime story this time is good, too.  The tragedy of kids and adults getting hooked on opioids is well presented here, with all details ringing true from what we readers unfortunately all know from our own associations with those confronting the same problems. And while Coleman is realistic about the prospects of Chief Stone making serious headway in his war against these particularly nasty and seductive drugs, he also gives us a handful of fairly nasty criminals at the top of the drug chain that Jesse might have at least some success against.

Some villains have to be defeated in these books, after all.

"Robert B. Parker's The Bitterest Pill", by Reed Farrel Coleman, is currently available in hardback, Kindle, and audio editions.