Spenser earned his degree in the school of hard knocks, so he is ready when a Boston university hires him to recover a rare, stolen manuscript. He is hardly surprised that his only clue is a radical student with four bullets in his chest.

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...

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.

Sunny Randall is hired by rich producer Buddy Bollen to protect his rising star and girlfriend, Erin Flint, when Erin's sister and personal trainer end up dead, and Sunny joins forces with Paradise, MA chief Jesse Stone to solve the case.

Spenser is called in to investigate when actor Jumbo Nelson is accused of raping and murdering a young woman, and as Spenser tries to uncover the truth, he forms an unusual alliance with Jumbo's bodyguard, a young Native American known as Sixkill.

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.

Tony and Brianna Lincoln, thrill killers have moved into a new neighborhood. They keep knocking off the locals one by one, and Jesse Stone is their next victim.

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.

When Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch arrive in Appaloosa, they find a small, dusty town suffering at the hands of renegade rancher Randall Bragg, a man who has so little regard for the law that he has taken supplies, horses, and women for his own and left the city marshal and one of his deputies for dead. Cole and Hitch, itinerant lawmen, are used to cleaning up after opportunistic thieves, but in Bragg they find an unusually wily adversary-one who...

Former Los Angeles police officer Jesse Stone, fired for drinking on the job, has taken a position as Chief of Police in Paradise, Massachusetts, but he learns that big city crime can happen even in the most bucolic of towns when the body of a young woman washes up on the shore of a local lake.