Night Passage

After a busted marriage kicks his drinking problems into overdrive and the LAPD unceremoniously dump him, 35-year-old Jesse Stone's future looks bleak. He is shocked, however, when a small Massachusetts town called Paradise hires him as their police chief. Once on board he doesn't have to look for trouble in Paradise - it comes to him. For what is on the surface a quiet New England community quickly proves to be a crucible of political and moral corruption - replete with triple homicide, tight Boston mob ties, flamboyantly errant spouses, maddened militiamen and a psychopath-about-town who has fixed his violent sights on the new lawman. He finds he must test his mettle and powers of command to emerge a local hero - or the deadest of dupes.

Robert B. Parker (1932–2010) has long been acknowledged as the dean of American crime fiction. His novels featuring the wise-cracking, street-smart Boston private-eye Spenser earned him a devoted following and reams of critical acclaim, typified by R.W.B. Lewis’ comment, ‘We are witnessing one of the great series in the history of the American detective story’ (
The New York Times Book Review
).

Born and raised in Massachusetts, Parker attended Colby College in Maine, served with the Army in Korea, and then completed a Ph.D. in English at Boston University. He married his wife Joan in 1956; they raised two sons, David and Daniel. Together the Parkers founded Pearl Productions, a Boston-based independent film company named after their short-haired pointer, Pearl, who has also been featured in many of Parker’s novels.

Robert B Parker died in 2010 at the age of 77.

‘Parker’s sentences flow with as much wit, grace and assurance as ever, and Stone is a complex and consistently interesting new protagonist’

-
Newsday

‘…Parker’s dialogue is always cutting and laugh out loud funny…’

-
Donna Leon

‘The spare style of Parker’s third-person narrative cleans the air’ –

-
New York Times

‘Parker writes old-time, stripped-to-the-bone, hard-boiled school of Chandler…His novels are funny, smart and highly entertaining…There’s no writer I’d rather take on an aeroplane’

–
Sunday Telegraph

‘Parker packs more meaning into a whispered “yeah” than most writers can pack into a page’

–
Sunday Times

‘Why Robert Parker’s not better known in Britain is a mystery. His best series featuring Boston-based PI Spenser is a triumph of style and substance’

–
Daily Mirror

‘Robert B. Parker is one of the greats of the American hard-boiled genre’

–
Guardian

‘Nobody does it better than Parker…’

–
Sunday Times

‘Parker’s sentences flow with as much wit, grace and assurance as ever, and Stone is a complex and consistently interesting new protagonist’

–
Newsday

‘If Robert B. Parker doesn’t blow it, in the new series he set up in
Night Passage
and continues with
Trouble in Paradise
, he could go places and take the kind of risks that wouldn’t be seemly in his popular Spenser stories’

– Marilyn Stasio
, New York Times

*Available from No Exit Press

For Joan:

Anywhere you are is Shangri-la

At the end of the continent, near the foot of Wilshire Boulevard, Jesse Stone stood and leaned on the railing in the darkness above the Santa Monica beach and stared at nothing, while below him the black ocean rolled away toward Japan.

There was no traffic on Ocean Avenue. There was the comfortless light of the streetlamps, but they were behind him. Before him was the uninterrupted darkness above the repetitive murmur of the disdainful sea.

A black-and-white cruiser pulled up and parked behind his car at the curb. A spotlight shone on it and one of the cops from the cruiser got out and looked into it. Then the spotlight swept along the verge of the cliffs and touched Jesse and went past him and came back and held. The strapping young L.A. patrolman walked over to him, holding his flashlight near the bulb end, the barrel of it resting on his shoulder, so he could use it as a club if he needed to. The young cop asked Jesse if he was all right. Jesse said he was, and the young cop asked him why he was standing there at four in the morning. The cop looked about twenty-four. Jesse felt like he could be his father, though in fact he was maybe ten years older.

“I’m a cop,” Jesse said.

“Got a badge?”

“Was a cop. I’m leaving town, just thought I’d stand here a while before I went.”

“That your car?” he said.

Jesse nodded.

“What division you work out of?” the young cop said.

“Downtown, Homicide.”

“Who runs it?”

“Captain Cronjager.”

“I can smell booze on you,” the young cop said.

“I’m waiting to sober up.”

“I can drive you home in your car,” the young cop said. “My partner will follow in the black and white.”

“I’ll stay here till I’m sober,” Jesse said.

“Okay,” the young cop said and went back to the cruiser and the cruiser pulled away. No one else came by. There was no sound except the tireless movement of the thick black water. Behind him the streetlights became less stark, and he realized he could see the first hint of the pier to his left. He turned slowly and looked back at the city behind him and saw that it was almost dawn. The streetlights looked yellow now, and the sky to the east was white. He looked back at the ocean once, then walked to his car and got in and started up. He drove along Ocean Avenue to the Santa Monica Freeway and turned onto it and headed east. By the time he passed Boyle Heights the sun was up and shining into his eyes as he drove straight toward it. Say goodbye to Hollywood, say goodbye my baby.

Tom Carson sat in the client chair across the desk from Hastings Hathaway in the president’s office of the Paradise Trust. He felt uneasy, as if he were in the principal’s office. He didn’t like the feeling. He was the chief of police, people were supposed to feel uneasy confronting him.

“You can quietly resign, Tom,” Hathaway said, “and relocate, we’ll be happy to help you with that financially, or you can, ah, face the consequences.”

“Consequences?” Carson tried to sound stern, but he could feel the bottom falling out of him.

“For you, and if necessary, I suppose, for your wife and your children.”

Carson cleared his throat, and felt ashamed that he’d had to.

“Such as?” he said as strongly as he could, trying hard to keep his gaze steady on Hathaway.

Why was Hathaway so scary? He was a geeky guy. In the eighth grade, before Hasty had gone away to school, Tom Carson had teased him. So had everyone else. Hathaway smiled. It was a thin geeky smile and it frightened Tom Carson further.

“We have resources, Tom. We could turn the problem over to Jo Jo and his associates, or, depending upon circumstance, we could deal with it ourselves. I don’t want that to happen. I’m your friend, Tom. I have so far been able to control the, ah, firebrands, but you’ll have to trust me. You’ll have to do what I ask.”

“Hasty,” Carson said. “I’m the chief of police, for crissake.”

Hathaway shook his head.

“You can’t just say I’m not,” Carson said.

“You don’t make the rules in this town, Tom.”