Robert B Parker

New York Times bestselling author of the Spenser series of crime thrillers - Book 2 in the series -
Appie Knoll is the kind of suburb where kids grow up right. But something is wrong. Fourteen-year-old Kevin Bartlett disappears. Everyone thinks he's run away — until the comic strip ransom note arrives.  It doesn't take Spenser long to get the picture — an affluent family seething with rage, a desperate boy making strange friends...friends...

The small town of Paradise is devastated when a star high-school baseball player is found dead at the bottom of a bluff just a day after winning the team's biggest game. For Jesse, the loss is doubly difficult. The dead teen was the nephew of his colleague, Suitcase Simpson, and Jesse had been coaching the young shortstop. As he searches for answers about how the boy died and why, he is stonewalled at every turn, and it seems that someone is determined...

Hired by a Massachusetts grand dame to prove the innocence of her grandson, who has been implicated in a school shooting, Spenser wonders why the boy seems unconcerned about his possible wrongful imprisonment.

Boone Adams: He was so smart he wrote half the English papers for the freshman class, when he wasn't getting drunk at night and waking up hung over in the morning. To him life was full of promise . . . just the ones it didn't intend to keep.
 
Jennifer Grayle: She was the campus golden girl, so rich, so pretty, that every boy wanted to take her out. Except Boone. He wanted to marry her.
John Merchent: He was tall and blond with blue...

Hired by a museum to provide protection for a stolen painting, Spenser is personally outraged when the ransom fails and the painting is not recovered, a case that makes him suspect the innocence of the art scholar who retained him.

Everett Hitch and Virgil Cole track down Virgil's sweetheart Allie and the three head north to start over in the town of Brimstone. Given their reputations as guns for hire, Everett and Virgil are able to secure positions as the town's deputies. But a sanctimonious leader of a local church stirs up trouble at the local saloons, and as the violence escalates into murder, the two struggle to keep the peace.

Appaloosa lawmen Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch return to find Amos Callico, a politically-ambitious chief of police, and twelve officers working in their town, but when Cole and Hitch refuse to work with Callico, the chief begins to threaten the local merchants into paying for his protection

Overwhelmed by a double homicide involving a mob hit, a high-ranking crime figure, and twin mafia wives, Jesse Stone increasingly succumbs to alcoholism before agreeing to assist fellow investigator Sunny Randall on a seemingly unrelated case.

When the body of a divorced Florida heiress washes ashore in Massachusetts, police chief Jesse Stone learns of the woman's past appearances in an erotic video and finds it suspicious that the victim's family seems unaffected by her death.

Police Chief Jesse Stone is shocked when Wilson "Crow" Cromartie, an Apache hit man who escaped Stone's grasp ten years ago, arrives in his office warning Jesse to stay out of his way as he searches for a missing woman whose father wants her back and is willing to risk anything to help her escape from the violent gang she's involved with.