- Title: Night and Day
- wiki: link
Throwback Tuesday takes us north to the sleepy town of Paradise, Massachusetts and its sheriff, Jesse Stone. The second-to-last of the Jesse Stone series to be written by Robert B. Parker, Night and Day makes use of a device Parker employed before in both Crimson Joy and Thin Air in which we see small snippets interspaced throughout the novel from another character’s perspective. In the case of Night and Day that character is the sexually-frustrated Seth Ralston whose voyeuristic peeping gets increasingly more aggressive with the armed invasion of women’s’ homes, romanticizing the encounters by calling himself the Night Hawk and sending letters to Stone and the Paradise Police Department.
Along the way Jesse will also learn of a swingers group in the town and how some of the parents’ activities are starting to affect their children which offers a secondary problem for Jesse to solve but one which eventually dovetails into the main story with the discovery that Ralston and his wife are members.
While there are less shoot-outs or dead bodies than in many of the Jesse Stone novels, Ralston does not meet a good end when the department lays a trap for the man using Molly Crane as bait. The other major aspect of the novel that stands out, which is tied to Jesse’s growing understanding of Ralston’s unhealthy obsession (and his own), is Jesse deciding to end things with his estranged ex-wife Jenn. The book closes with Jesse sharing a drink with his on-again/off-again romantic interest of Sunny Randall in threads that will weave in and out of both series.