THE BLUE HOUR

Parker’s seventh California thriller (Where Serpents Lie, 1998, etc.) leads with a bright new twist: the hero is Tim Hess, a retired, divorced, and childless cop with an apparent death sentence of cancer hanging over him as he goes about tracking down a serial killer. Meanwhile, he’s keeping company with—and taking orders from—good-looking, right uppity Detective Merci Rayborn, who can be one big pain and has already marked her way up the ladder of promotions. The two of them want to find the Purse Snatcher, a kidnaping slayer of beautiful Laguna County women. But since there are no bodies, only the women’s purses lying in blood, might they still be alive? As often happens with Parker novels, the main plot has familiar echoes, but that hardly matters when the reader is guaranteed a richly metaphoric and suspenseful ride to the end, especially as Hess’s deepening passion for Merci gives him ever more reason to live. It’s safe to say that Parker has never before come up with as moving an ending as he unwinds here, while titillating us along the way with a psycho whose only fault is his irresistible fixation on giving gorgeous women eternal beauty—just as the hormone treatments he’s been given to reduce his sexual cravings have given him a pair of breasts. Ah, Parker in top form.