...Parker's dialogue is always cutting and laugh out loud funny ...

Donna Leon

hat can the 35-year-old Jesse Stone do that the ageless and presumably immutable Spenser can't? That's the question that keeps nagging as you read Night Passage, Robert B. Parker's strong first entry in a projected series about an alcoholic homicide detective struggling to rebuild his ruined life.

When Jesse is double-dumped, first by his wife and then by the Los Angeles Police Department, he crawls out of town and heads east, hoping to redeem himself as Chief of Police in a Massachusetts coastal town called Paradise. To set the melancholy tone and purgative nature of Jesse's redemptive journey, Parker takes him through a memorable cross-country passage that begins and ends with the damaged hero standing alone by the cleansing waters of an ocean, riddled with self-doubt but ready for a fresh start. For all the obvious non-Spenserian qualities that determine his character - his relative youth, the drinking thing, his lousy taste in women, an absence of humor, his raw isolation and social insecurities - it is this capacity to change his life and redeem his soul that really distinguishes the appealingly flawed Jesse from Spenser, who is already perfect and doesn't he just know it.

The spare style of Parker's third-person narrative cleans the air and sharpens Jesse's sense of alienation in Paradise, a pretty place with an ugly secret that the corrupt civic leaders assume will not be noticed by a lush like Jesse. Too bad for them (and for the story), the new Chief of Police makes a remarkably quick recovery from the bad habits that got him hired and is soon diligently investigating three violent deaths and a sinister paramilitary group. ''He's got more iron in him than I was expecting,'' one selectman uneasily observes. Indeed, with his strength of character and clarity of mind miraculously restored, Jesse begins to exercise the kind of moral convictions that could get him killed - or compared to Spenser.

Marilyn Stasio, New York Times