ROBERT B. PARKER'S BAD INFLUENCE (Alison Gaylin, 2023)

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If anyone could make a story about Instagram influencers not only readable but compulsively so, I should have known that it'd be Alison: I've been a fan since we first connected back in the MySpace days, TRASHED being my first foray into her narrative mind and, with BAD INFLUENCE, the first of her (hopefully many) continuations of Robert B. Parker's Sunny Randall stories, she not only renders an accurate depiction of Boston (I lived there for 10 years and her evocation of it made me feel back “home” (read: the home that’s more home than the home of my first 18 years) – though I was perplexed by how easy it was for her characters to find parking; the true fictional license of the story, I suppose) but manages – thanks to her unmatched ability to craft an emotional honesty for each character, no matter how small their role – something that only the best writers can pull off: she makes Parker’s creations wholly her own. Highly recommended.

quiet virtual walks for therapy and fascination

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Thanks to this morning's Recomendo newsletter, I've become addicted to "quiet virtual walks" through cities on YouTube. My favorite channels (so far) are Nomadic Ambience (worldwide fascinations) and Virtual Japan (walking Tokyo at night, among other Japanese and worldwide locales). And, while they can’t fill the commonwealth-sized hole in my soul, I've found quiet virtual walks of Boston (via The Table and Virtual Stroll) to be therapeutic doses of nostalgia for the city I called home for a decade (and in which I whiled many hours via solitary city walks at all hours of the day and night).

SMALL MERCIES (Lehane, 2023)

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After two disappointing releases – WORLD GONE BY and SINCE WE FELL, the former being a forgettable coda to an otherwise unforgettable historical fiction trilogy and the latter a notable though deeply flawed effort at playing outside his usual wheelhouse (I think, at the time, I called it his effort at GONE GIRL – and not in a good way) – Lehane roars back to life with, perhaps, his best work yet, one I will gladly mention in the same breath as MYSTIC RIVER, the masterpiece to which SMALL MERCIES feels like a spiritual successor: after a middling effort at a female protagonist in SINCE WE FELL, Lehane has crafted, in MERCIES's Mary Pat Fennessy, one of his most fascinating protagonists, a "broken and unbreakable" mother on a vengeance-driven suicide run through the mid-70s Southie underbelly ("Marty Butler" standing in for Whitey Bulger) on the eve of the 1974 school desegregation, an uncompromising ripping of the duct-tape bandaid from one of the ugliest, darkest periods in Boston's appalling racist history. A must-read; my complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.

P.S. While I believe SMALL MERCIES was meant to be a standalone, should Lehane decide to continue the story of Detective Michael "Bobby" Coyne, I'd be beyond thrilled...

memory / narrative

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Memories of Boston while making coffee / motor oil ten miles from where I grew up (though at this point, those memories have ceased to be actual memories and have become personal, internal narratives winding, looping): fascination at how those memory / narratives are centered around one person or, in the case of Boston, four – one to four being representative of, indicative of, an entire timeframe / an entire place / an entire iteration of self: joys, fuckups, regrets, longings: moments in time colliding and metamorphosing into some unconsidered shard of themselves.