Jesse Stone has a problem. Actually, several, with bodies turning up and no clues. Investigating a serial killer in an affluent suburban town is difficult, and dangerous, and with the added pressures from the town selectmen and the media, Jesse's really feeling the heat.
The last time Jesse Stone, chief of police of Paradise, Massachusetts, saw Wilson "Crow" Cromartie, the Apache Indian hit man was racing away in a speedboat after executing one of the most lucrative and deadly heists in the town's history. Crow was part of a team of ex-cons who plotted to capture Stiles Island, the wealthy enclave off the Paradise coast, by blowing up the connecting bridge. Residents were kidnapped, some were killed, and Crow managed to escape with a boatload of cash, never to be seen again. Until now.
Chief of Police Jesse Stone returns to investigate the murder of a troubled teenager in a seemingly bucolic New England town. The Paradise Men's Softball League has wrapped up another game, and Jesse Stone is lingering in the parking lot with his team-mates, drinking beer, swapping stories of double plays and beautiful women in the late summer twilight. But then a voice, scared, calls out to him from the edge of a nearby lake. He walks to the sound, where two men squat at the water's edge.
After being kicked out of the LAPD, Jesse Stone's future looks bleak, until he is given another chance as the police chief in a small New England town. However, the town turns out to be rife with homicides, maddened militiamen and crazed psychopaths.
Boston PI Spenser returns - heading west to the rich man's haven of Potshot, Arizona, a former mining town reborn as a paradise for Los Angeles millionaires looking for a place to escape the pressures of their high-flying lifestyles. Potshot overcame its rough reputation as a rendezvous for old-time mountain men who lived off the land, thanks to a healthy infusion of new blood and even newer money. But when this western idyll is threatened by a local gang - a twenty-first-century posse of desert rats, misfits, drunks and scavengers - the local police seem powerless.
