When two seemingly unconnected mysterious deaths occur on his watch, police chief Jesse Stone must pull out all the stops to unravel the truth and stop a killer from striking again.

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 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 to keep him from digging further.

Jesse suddenly must divide his attention between two cases after the shocking murder of former Paradise police chief, Charlie Farrell. Before his death, Farrell had been looking into a series of scam calls that preyed upon the elderly. But how do these 'ghost calls' connect to his murder? When threats - and gunshots - appear on Jesse's own doorstep, the race to find answers is on. Both old and new enemies come into play, and in the end, Jesse and his team must discover the common factor between the two deaths in order to prevent a third.

'Parker writes old-time, stripped-to-the-bone, hard-boiled school of Chandler... His novels are funny, smart and highly entertaining... There's no writer I'd rather take on an aeroplane' - Sunday Telegraph

'Parker packs more meaning into a whispered "yeah" than most writers can pack into a page' - Sunday Times

'Robert B. Parker is one of the greats of the American hard-boiled genre' - Guardian

'Lupica's best yet in the franchise. Parker fans will be charmed' - Publishers Weekly

'Lupica seems thoroughly comfortable carrying on the fictional lives of Robert B. Parker's characters. He has the jaunty tone down pat, and everything flows from that with Parker's people' - Booklist