This is the kind of hard-biting police thriller that appeals more often to men than to women. For that reason, I have not often picked up a Parker novel. It is, however, a fast read, and it is certainly very well written of its genre.
"Stranger in Paradise" reads more like a script for a TV thriller than a novel. There is lots of crisp, succinct dialog and not much descriptive connective tissue between the sequences of dialog.
The book is one in the series about Police Chief, Jesse Stone of Paradise, Massachusetts, who meets up for the first time in 10 years with a full-blooded Apache who hires out as a hit man, Wilson Cromartie. These strange bedfellows team up to protect a teenage girl from her gangster boyfriend and her organized crime boss father. In the process the girl's mother and lots of bad guys get killed. It is a little hard to feel sympathetic with the victims or most of the main characters.
Somehow the police chief manages to look the other way, as if, the ends justify the means, in ridding the world of gangsters without the benefit of trial. It's also ok to have guiltless sex with no strings attached.
While I prefer my fiction to have a little more descriptive and thematic content, I guess reading this book was at least as enriching as spending an evening watching the latest crime-buster series on TV.
Liz Nichols
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