Michael Brandman

Michael Brandman was an American television and film producer who became a novelist late in his career, continuing Robert B. Parker's Jesse Stone series after Parker's death in 2010. Brandman had a long prior relationship with the character, having produced the television movies adapting Jesse Stone for CBS starring Tom Selleck, which gave him deep familiarity with the small-town Massachusetts police chief before he began writing new prose installments. As a producer, Brandman's career included extensive television work, and his transition to authorship for the Jesse Stone continuation drew directly on his visual, scene-based sensibility from decades in film and TV production. He wrote several Jesse Stone novels before Reed Farrel Coleman took over the series, contributing new cases for the character while working to preserve Parker's terse dialogue-driven style. Brandman's dual career, moving from adapting Parker's work for the screen to extending it in prose, made him one of the more unusual entries among the various authors entrusted with continuing Parker's several series after his death.