Sea Change by Robert B. Parker

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Reading as part of my Florida collection:

Robert Parker dovetails his typical Massachusetts setting for his Jesse Stone character with locations in Southeast Florida involving a crime involving yachts, wild kids and sex. Not that it had to be Florida. He could just as well had the alternate location in Virginia or New Jersey. To do that, though, more narrative would’ve been required. So, Parker takes the easy route and assumes the reader is carrying a stacked knowledge of Florida stereotypes. Big house, rich and arrogant people, beach bars are about as detailed as Parker gets in this book involving Florida.

What I found odd was the lack of narrative in describing scenes in Massachusetts, too. In fact, this book is nearly fifty percent dialogue. The writing of that is Ok, but it’s difficult to often know much of anything involving the surroundings. Seems to me a deadline to get the book in to the publisher got too close and Parker slung this out. The format I picked up this book in was the taller $9.99 version. A ton of kerning happened to stretch this book to fit it and is further indication that Parker may have quickly written this to meet a deadline.

My usual complaint of fluffing a contemporary book up is certainly the case here. This time, though, it’s the dialogue that needed severe trimming. There’s a side story involving Stone’s relationship with is ex-wife that doesn’t fit well.

overall this book does have Florida locations, but are not well written and locations are very general. The overall book seems to me to be a whole lot of dialogue looking for a good story.

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