An Apache hit man arrives in Paradise to find a missing girl and snuff out her mother. But his conscience is getting the best of him. If he doesn’t make the hit, he’ll pay for it. So might Jesse Stone, who’s been enlisted to protect them all.

The Paradise Men's Softball League has wrapped up another game, and 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 a frightened voice calls out to him from the edge of a nearby lake. There, two men squat at the water's edge. In front of them, facedown, was something that used to be a girl. The local cops haven't seen anything...

Robert B. Parker introduces readers to police chief Jesse Stone in the first novel in the beloved mystery series—a New York Times bestseller.
After a busted marriage kicks his drinking problem into overdrive and the LAPD unceremoniously dumps him, thirty-five-year-old Jesse Stone’s future looks bleak. So he’s shocked when a small Massachusetts town called Paradise recruits him as police chief. He can’t help...

After his involuntary retirement, Jesse Stone investigates the suspicious death of a young friend while the Paradise police force deals with the arrogant new chief, who is the son-in-law of a town councilman.

When a visiting actress becomes the subject of a death threat, Jesse and the rest of the Paradise police department go on high alert. And when Jesse witnesses a horrifying collision caused by a distracted teenage driver, the political repercussions of her arrest bring him into conflict with the local selectmen, the DA, and some people with very deep pockets.

"Sunny Randall, the Boston P.I. with a personal life as tangled as that of her clients, is hired on as bodyguard to an up-and-coming starlet, and discovers some ugly truths behind her glossy facade." "Buddy Bollen is a C-list movie mogul who made his fortune producing films of questionable artistic merit. When Buddy hires Sunny Randall to protect his rising star and girlfriend, Erin Flint, Sunny knows from the start that the prickly, spoiled beauty...

In the wake of a huge storm, three bodies are discovered in the rubble of an abandoned factory building in an industrial part of Paradise known as The Swap. One body, a man's, wrapped in a blue tarp, is only hours old. But found within feet of that body are the skeletal remains of two teenage girls who had gone missing during a Fourth of July celebration twenty-five years earlier. Not only does that crime predate Jesse Stone's arrival in Paradise,...

Jesse Stone is shot while moonlighting on a Boston stakeout, leaving his friend fighting for his life and Stone out for justice. His rogue investigation to find the shooter leads him into Boston's shady underworld. This leads him right into the bed of a Boston PD investigator, who wants his head on a platter if he continues to pursue the case. Meanwhile, Stone is approached by a broken-hearted mother who is convnced her kidnapped son is still alive....

Jesse Stone is a down-and-out former L.A. police detective whose biggest battle is now against the bottle, as the demons of his past rise to haunt him while he drives himself to distraction by pursuing a decade-old murder case. Finding refuge in the small town of Paradise, Chief Stone reopens an unsolved murder case, digging up clues in an old grave and pursuing the ghosts of a forgotten crime. But it's not just the victim's and killer's pasts that...

Stone is a quiet chief of police in a cold, gray, seaside town. When a serial killer strikes, this tough cop is in the thick of it. Add his girlfriend, an ex-wife and a sexy defense attorney, and things really heat up.