Robert B. Parker

The Paradise Men's Softball League has wrapped up another game, and Chief of Police Jesse Stone is lingering in the parking lot with his teammates, drinking beer, swapping stories of double plays and beautiful women in the late-summer twilight. But then someone makes a horrifying discovery at a...

Fast-talking, trouble-seeking private eye Philip Marlowe is a different kind of detective: a moral man in an amoral world. California in the ’40s and ’50s is as beautiful as a ripe fruit and rotten to the core, and Marlowe must struggle to retain his integrity amidst the corruption he...

A battered body washes ashore in Paradise, Massachusetts, during the town's biggest event - Race Week. Jesse's investigation takes him to Florida, and back, while his private life takes him back to his ex-wife...

The most dangerous man to cross is one who isn't afraid to die. But the most deadly is one who doesn't want to live. And Spenser has just lost the woman who made life his #1 priority. So when a religious sect kidnaps a pretty young dancer, no death threat can make Spenser cut and run. Now a hit...

“Ebullient entertainment.”—Time A hotshot reporter is dead. He'd gone to take a look-see at “Miami North”—little Wheaton, Massachusetts—the biggest cocaine distribution center above the Mason-Dixon line. Did the kid die for getting too close to the truth . . . or to a sweet lady...

When the body of controversial talk-show host Walton Weeks is discovered hanging from a tree on the outskirts of Paradise, police chief Jesse Stone finds himself at the center of a highly public case. When another dead body–that of a young woman–is discovered just a few days later, the...

A richly imagined novel of the Old West, as spare and vivid as a high plains sunset, from one of the world's most talented performers. It was a long time ago, now, and there were many gunfights to follow, but I remember as well as I remember anything the first time I saw Virgil Cole shoot. Time...

The adoring wife of a senatorial candidate has a smile as sweet as candy and dots her "i's" with little hearts. A blond beauty, she is the perfect mate for an ambitious politician, but she has a little problem with sex and drugs--a problem someone has managed to put on videotape. The big boys...

Spenser smells corruption in a college town. Taft University's hottest basketball star is shaving points for quick cash. All manner of sleaze -- from corrupt academics to hoods with graduate degrees -- have their fingers in the pot. Spenser's search takes him from lecture halls to blue collar...

A serial killer is on the loose in Beantown and the cops can't catch him. But when the killer leaves his red rose calling card for Spenser's own Susan Silverman, he gets all the attention that Spenser and Hawk can give. Spenser plays against time while he tracks the Red Rose killer from Boston's...

When a Hollywood-based TV series schedules filming in Boston, Spenser smells trouble. When he signs up to protect the show's star, Jill Joyce, he knows it's on its way. First, there's Jill herself. She's spoiled, arrogant, drugged out -- made worse by fear. Someone is out to get her -- does she...

Police chief Jesse Stone has received his share of unusual calls, but none can top the one from the local junior high school. When reports of lewd conduct by the school’s principal, Betsy Ingersoll, filter into the station, Jesse is faced with a particularly delicate situation. Jesse, of...

Nice girls don't. But blond, beautiful April Kyle does. She's a hooker hooked on the wrong guy -- and she's on her way to trouble. So is Spenser. Looking out for April has landed him in the crud of Times Square. It's not a long way to big-business boardrooms where blood money get laundered into...

The last time Jesse Stone, police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts, saw Wilson "Crow" Cromartie, the Apache hit man was racing away in a speedboat after executing one of the most lucrative and deadly heists in the town's history. Crow managed to escape with a boatload of cash, never to be seen...

The body in the trunk was just the beginning. Turns out the stiff was a foot soldier for local tough guy Reggie Galen, now enjoying a comfortable “retirement” with his beautiful wife, Rebecca, in the nicest part of Paradise. Living next door are Knocko Moynihan and his wife, Robbie, who also...

A young man resurfaces from Spenser's past to seek out the likeable P.I.'s guidance and help to solve the mysterious and sudden disappearance of the boy's mother. The most personal and revealing Spenser thriller of all, the hardboiled yet caring detective faces danger and a reckoning with his...

His name was Jason Green and he was dead. When a shy high school student’s body is found washed up on the shore of a quiet New England beach town–an alleged suicide linked to steroids–fifteen-year-old boxer-in-training Terry Novak isn’t quite sure what to think. Something just doesn’t...

Spenser is back and embroiled in a dangerous and multi-layered case. Someone has been killing racehorses at stables across the south, and Walter Clive, president of Three Fillies Stables, hires him to find out who. Spenser goes to Georgia to protect Hugger Mugger, a two-year-old destined to...

The indefatigable, poetry-dishing Spenser finds himself in the middle of yet another whopper of a case. A seemingly dim blonde with a supermodel-class body is accused of murdering her blue-blooded, Mayflower-descended banker of a husband. Her alibi: she was watching Survivor in another room...

Boston P.I. Spenser returns — heading west to the rich man's haven of Potshot, Arizona, a former mining town recently reborn as a paradise for Los Angeles millionaires looking for a place to escape the pressures of their high-flying lifestyles. When a band of modern-day mountain men, led by a...