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 bars and finally into a bloody confrontation with almost certain death. But Spenser saves an arrogant young athlete -- even though it nearly kills him to do it.
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 long green, sex is a commodity, and young girls are the currency.
When a serial murderer dubbed "The Spare Change Killer" by the Boston press surfaces after three decades in hiding, the police immediately seek out the cop, now retired, who headed the original task force: Phil Randall. As a sharp-eyed investigator and a doting parent ("You're smart. You're tough. You, too, are a paradigm of law enforcement perfection, and you're my kid"), Phil calls on his daughter, Sunny, to help catch the criminal who eluded him so many years before.
In Blue Screen Sunny Randall is hired by Buddy Bollen, a movie producer who lives in Jesse Stone's Paradise, to protect his main lay, Erin Flint, a B-movie actress. When Erin's sister is murdered, Erin asks Randall to investigate and this brings her in contact with Jesse Stone. The investigation involves the usual Robert B. Parker scene of the detective discussing the case with a local mobster, a close friend, and an intimate friend, shuffling to and back from another big city, discussions on the nature of human nature, and all the other Robert B. Parker stuff.
