Michael Brandman

I love Robert B. Parker. I read all the Spenser books (39, I believe), nearly all the Jesse Stones & Sunny Randalls, plus Gunman's Rhapsody, Love and Glory, and the finish-me-if-you-can Chandler, Poodle Springs. A lovely body of work. Wish I'd done that. And I can see why Joan and/or the estate wanted to keep 'em coming, with Michael Brandman writing the Jesse Stones and Ace Atkins the Spensers. But I stopped reading them after Parker passed on. It seemed disloyal. Still does. I read a bit show more of the Parker/Atkins Lullaby; it had the Parker snap, but not the crackle and pop. Also a lot less Pearl the dog, sex with Susan, and restaurant reviews, all to the good, I thought.

So here's the newest Jesse Stone, by Michael Brandman. Stone's a great character, well-known from tv as well as books. Tom Selleck even helps create his stories. In Damned if You Do, Brandman's done a terrific job, combining two very interesting threads into an under-300-page novel, even with wide margins & deep chapter openings.

Most of the familiar characters are here: Suitcase, Molly, Healy, Gino Fish, Dix the shrink. Missing are the dog, the ex-wife, the sexy lady lawyer, and multiple bottles of scotch. The first story is the murder of a young girl in a local motel, which widens into a gang war between competing prostitution bosses; the second story concerns a local nursing home, with both human & health violations that overstep multiple boundaries. The Paradise police chief resolves both (unrelated) problems in nonconventional ways.

Stone still has a smart mouth on him, but seems toned down, less angst-ridden, somewhat more tame. Oh, and in some parts, his creative solutions come from having collaborated with the bad guys, which I found interesting from a humanistic, let's-all-work-together point of view, and strange from a legal vs illegal stance. Enjoyed it a lot, read all the pages, in order, quickly. show less

With their short sentences, short paragraphs, dialogue-heavy style, and terse descriptions Robert B. Parker's mystery novels feel simple. It's only when you start to think about the way they're put together that you realize how much art there is behind the simplicity, and how carefully chosen the words and the sparse lines of description are. Michael Brandman probably knows Jesse Stone and the rest of the supporting characters better than anyone besides Parker himself. He's a competent show more writer, and he understands Parker's style. The fact that, even with all those advantages, this entire book feels as "off" as a red ace of spades tells you something about how effortlessly good Parker really was.

Brandman gets the big things mostly right: The multi-threaded plot feels like a Jesse Stone story, and the characters are recognizably who they are. The small things, though, are consistently wrong. The characters don't quite act or sound like they're "supposed" to, and the rhythms of their conversations are subtly off -- like a comedy act with the lines consistently coming half-a-beat too early or too late. It happens occasionally with Jesse and Molly, more frequently with Jesse and Healy, and pretty consistently with Jesse and Suitcase Simpson. When Jesse talks to less-established characters it becomes excruciating.

Missing, too, is the understated crispness of Parker's descriptions. Brandman only adds a sentence or two to what Parker would have written, but it's enough. Ever notice that Parker never, ever describes gunfights at a level beyond: "I shot him twice in the chest, and he went down?" You will, retrospectively, because Brandman wants to tell you (just a little) about how the hero drew his gun, or how the body fell, and even that extra sentence gums up the flow of the scene.

If this had been the first book in a series about a small-town Massachusetts police chief with a troubled past, named something other than Jesse Stone, it would have rated 3 stars, maybe more. But both Brandman and the marketing folks at Putnam's wanted to make it a Robert B. Parker book about Jesse Stone, from the pen of somebody else. Problem is, Brandman isn't that good.

Maybe nobody is. show less

Once again, Jesse Stone mounts his trusty steed, dons his white hat, and rides into the fray, determined to make right what's wrong, without regard to personal consequences. He ignores threats, won't be bribed, cajoled or reasoned with. In this case, he's on the trail of the killer of a young prostitute who seems vaguely familiar to him, and he's drawing down on the corporate bastards who are running a rotten nursing home where the patients receive very little care other than sedation and show more restraint. For the first 50 or 60 pages of Damned if You Do, I couldn't hear Jesse's voice in his dialog, and despite having read every one of the preceding books in the series, I felt a bit like I had been plopped down in the middle of the game without a program. I feared the worst. But I found my bearings, or Brandman found his, and the rest of the book tore right along as I expect these novels to do. This is definitely not a book for anyone who isn't already familiar with the characters, and devoted followers may be puzzled to find Jesse easing off on the coffee AND the scotch, with nary a mention of his ex-wife, and seemingly on the same side of things as the Paradise town selectmen for a change. There's a brilliant take-off on "Who's on First" between Captain Healey and Jesse, obligatory appearances by Gino Fish and his current pretty-boy doorkeeper, and some fairly intense action scenes. All in all, a fine way to spend another couple hours in Paradise. show less

When I read Michael Brandman’s first attempt to continue the late Robert B. Parker’s series about Jesse Stone and the Paradise Police Department, I felt like the characters had been possessed by aliens, and the dialogue was as subtly “wrong” as a red ace of spades. Damned If You Do, the third Brandman-as-Parker outing, feels exactly the same way. Then, I was willing to believe that Brandman might just need time to “get” Parker’s unique, deceptively simple rhythms. Now, I have show more to conclude that he’s never going to get them. Damned If You Do also, however, fails at an even more basic level: It offers two intertwined plotlines, and neither one of them works well.

“Justice for a dead girl,” which drives Jesse’s search for the murderer of a young prostitute, is an evergreen mystery-story plot, but everything about this iteration of it feels perfunctory and forced. Jesse has no connection to the victim (and only an arbitrary one to her mother); other characters tell him, for no apparent reason, nearly everything he needs to know to solve the mystery; and – in a thoroughly unbelievable climax – they, not he, bring closure to the case. Jesse is more active in, and more plausibly connected to, a second case involving a local nursing home whose profit-hungry corporate masters allow patients (including one of Jesse’s friends) to suffer. Brandman earns his emotional responses here, Jesse’s rage is both palpable and believable, and his actual solution is satisfying. The emotional impact of the story is constantly dissipated, however, by extended info-dumps and unmotivated eruptions of violence.

When the violence in a mystery novel seems to have been inserted because the author felt like his hero ought to get a chance to hit somebody before the book ends, something’s off. Damned if You Do is, in the end, “off” far more than it’s on. Accordingly, I’m done with the series. show less