Stranger in Paradise

When I picked up Stranger in Paradise, A Jesse Stone Novel, I remembered seeing a television movie staring Tom Selleck as Jesse Stone. I've since learned the Jesse Stone series was the basis for seven television movies and the television series, Spenser For Hire, starring Robert Urich, was based on his Spenser novels. The author of these novels, Robert B. Parker, died January 18, 2010.

In this novel, Crow, an Apache Indian hit man who kidnapped residents, killed some of them, and escaped with a boatload of cash, shows up in Jesse's office ten years after the crime. Crow's current assignment is to find Amber, who is living with her mother Fiona and involved with a Latino gang, and return her to her father, Louis, a mobster. However, when Louis orders Crow to kill Fiona first before returning Amber to him, Crow refuses because he doesn't kill women. Crow then takes Amber to Jesse to protect her from both her father and the gang.

About 99% of the time I prefer the book over the movie. This one, however, falls in the one-percent category primarily because the movie was cleaned up (language and sexual content) for television.

The Bear and The Dragon

Tom Clancy's The Bear and The Dragon, copyrighted in 2000, is one of my bargain books from a library sale several years ago. The shear size of the book, 1028 pages, kept me from reading it until this month. Now I know why I put off reading this bear of a book.

The first approximately 600 pages was all about setting up three story lines involving intelligence agencies, political figures and the military in Washington, DC, Moscow,and Beijing. Clancy's recurring characters continue to deal with the intelligence world, government investigations and negotiations and a climax that involves the threat of nuclear war so it is classic Clancy. I would have liked this one much better if it had been condensed to about 400 pages and the profanity had been left out. The conflict revolves around China going after Russia's Siberian gold and oil resources. In this book, the Americans are aligned with the Russians (the good guys) against the Chinese (the bad guys). However, it took so long to get near the conflict I lost interest several times and it took weeks to finish reading it.

If you enjoy books that move quickly, you'll be disappointed. On the other hand, if you like lengthy books that delve into the characters and the details within many subplots, you'll like this one. As for me, I'm just glad I made it to page 1028 so I can check it off my reading list. 

Making Waves

I love bargain books and this is one of many I've accumulated. Making Waves, by Cassandra King, was originally published in 1995 and I found this 2004 first mass market edition on the sale rack. The picket fence on the front cover first caught my eye and the title prompted me to read the back cover.

In a small Alabama town, a beauty shop and a funeral set the stage for characters with familiar traits of people we know or have read about. The story is about love, friendship, betrayal and loss with a bit of humor and mystery in the mix. But be warned, it also has offensive language sprinkled in and teetered between promoting and degrading Christianity, which I found unsettling.

This book is also written in first person by four of the book's characters using chapters to change viewpoints. I didn't think it flowed as well as staying within one first-person viewpoint or using third person. However, everyone has their preferred style of reading and writing so others may prefer this one.