“Split Image”  By Robert B. Parker

     A Jesse Stone Novel

2011 Book Review #117

Book List Review

Petrov Ognowski is dead. A bullet bounced around inside his skull for about six hours before Suit Simpson, a patrol officer in the small Massachusetts town of Paradise, found the body. Petrov worked for Reggie Galen, one of two crime bosses who call Paradise home. The other, Knocko Moynihan, lives across the street from Galen.

Suit's boss, chief of police, Jesse Stone, finally has occasion to find out why two onetime rivals choose to be neighbors. (Seems they married identical twin sisters, Rebecca and Roberta, known as the Bang Bang Twins in high school.) Reggie and Knocko are shocked about Petrov's fate but, give Jesse no help with the case.

In the meantime, Jesse, still hurting from the latest breakup with his ex-wife, is helping old friend, private detective, Sunny Randall, star of her own series, track down a teenager who has moved in with a New Age commune.

The three non-converging plotlines are linked tenuously by one theme: the two mobsters with their Bang Bang twins; the teenager, denied affection from her rigidly aristocratic parents, with her commune cohorts; and Jesse and Sunny with each other.

And the crimes? The commune is more creepy than comfy, and the Bang Bang Twins may have set in motion a series of events that will lead to violence.

Parker's ninth Jesse Stone novel finds the series in slight decline. The plotlines are thin hence the need for three, but, the dialogue is sharp, and the Jesse-Sunny romance has possibilities.

My Thoughts:  I heard this book on audiotape and became irritated at all the, “he said, she said” dialog. The plot was okay, but, the characters were not very interesting!