Police Chief Jessee Stone is set to return on September 10th, 2019 in Robert B. Parker’s The Bitterest Pill, the latest novel from New York Times bestselling author Reed Farrel Coleman.
Following last year’s Colorblind, which saw Stone return to the job after a stint in rehab to take on a number of racially motivated crimes, Coleman’s latest (the 18th Stone book to date, and sixth written by Coleman) will again feature a timely plot as the Paradise, Massachusetts police chief tackles the opioid crisis. See the official plot details and cover art below!
When a popular high school cheerleader dies of a suspected heroin overdose, it becomes clear that the opioid epidemic has spread even to the idyllic town of Paradise. It will be up to police chief Jesse Stone to unravel the supply chain and unmask the criminals behind it, and the investigation has a clear epicenter: Paradise High School. Home of the town’s best and brightest future leaders and its most vulnerable down-and-out teens, it’s a rich and bottomless market for dealers out of Boston looking to expand into the suburbs.
But when it comes to drugs, the very people Jesse is trying to protect are often those with the most to lose. As he digs deeper into the case, he finds himself battling self-interested administrators, reluctant teachers, distrustful schoolkids, and overprotective parents . . . and at the end of the line are the true bad guys, the ones with a lucrative business they’d kill to protect.
Robert B. Parker was the author of seventy books, including the legendary Spenser detective series, the novels featuring Chief Jesse Stone, and the acclaimed Virgil Cole/Everett Hitch westerns, as well as the Sunny Randall novels. Winner of the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award and long considered the undisputed dean of American crime fiction, he died in January 2010.
Reed Farrel Coleman, author of the New York Times-bestselling Robert B. Parker’s Colorblind, has been called a “hard-boiled poet” by NPR’s Maureen Corrigan. He has published twenty-eight previous novels. A four-time winner of the Shamus Award, he has also won the Anthony, Macavity, Barry, and Audie awards. Coleman lives with his family on Long Island.
Though we’re still eight months away from publication, fans of the Jesse Stone series can now pre-order Coleman’s Robert B. Parker’s The Bitterest Pill wherever books are sold.
Praised as “one of today’s finest book reviewers” by New York Times bestselling author Gayle Lynds, Ryan Steck (“The Godfather of the thriller genre” — Ben Coes) has “quickly established himself as the authority on mysteries and thrillers” (Author A.J. Tata). Steck also works full-time as a freelance editor and pens a monthly thriller column for CrimeReads. For more information, be sure to follow him on Twitter and Facebook. He currently lives in Southwest Michigan with his wife and their six children.