Robert B. Parker’s The Bitterest Pill: A Jesse Stone Novel

A workmanlike mystery, using some of Parker’s characters and settings.

Jesse Stone is now living in a condominium, is dependent on AA meetings, and has (as we are told) a son he never suspected, a lost fiancé’, and other background information. There is a lot of telling regarding Coleman’s evolution of this beloved character in several earlier Parker-derived volumes I have not read. The telling is a tad of a drag on the storyline, so not a stand-alone piece.

Addiction is a central theme, centering on the oxycodone plague, but reflecting in Jesse’s own alcoholism. No one drug-addicted seems to be incapable of serious plotting or totally unethical behavior. Treatment of dealers drifted up to Jesse’s Paradise from the expanding Boston crime milieu is unsparing, condemning, and attributing to murderous first impulses.

There is leaning on past relationships, and frankly, rather obviously careful use of points of view that become tedious as they are used to obfuscate any reader pre-solution. This is not uncommon among mystery writers, but it became a bit of a grump for me

|If you can find it at the library, do so.