Red Light - Softcover

Parker, Jefferson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0007101937 ISBN 13: 9780007101931

Publisher: HarperFiction, 2010

Synopsis

‘Parker has only one competitor – Thomas Harris’ Washington Post ... At once horrifying, tense and lyrical, The Blue Hour is a beautifully written novel that probes the darkest recesses of the human psyche.

He takes the women from shopping malls. They are beautiful, sophisticated, but he treats them like animals, and when he’s done he leaves only his grisly signature to taunt the Orange County police – a purse full of entrails. Where are the bodies? How can these women disappear so completely? Whatever the Purse Snatcher has done to them, it surely cannot be worse than the imaginings of a shock-hardened police force...but they don’t know the sick mind they’re dealing with.

Detective Hess has given his life to the police, but now lung cancer is looking to claim him. Merci Rayborn is at the beginning of her career and she’s determined to get to the top, whatever it takes. Assigned to the case by a boss with a hidden agenda, Hess and Merci at first agree on just one thing: they want to catch the Purse Snatcher and see him fry. But as another woman disappears, and then another, they become united through their obsession with a case that will change both their lives forever.

About this title

Review:

Parker's many fans met Merci Rayborn, the Orange County homicide investigator, in The Blue Hour, and will be happy to renew their acquaintance with her in Red Light. Although she is still mourning the death of her former partner Tim Hess, who fathered her two-year-old son, her relationship with fellow cop Mike McNally is progressing nicely, and so is her career on the force. Then two murders, decades apart, come together in a way that shakes Merci's world both personally and professionally; two beautiful young prostitutes are both killed for what they knew and what they threatened to tell. Who's covering up the corruption in the department that led to the first murder? And was Merci's lover responsible for the second? Someone's sending Merci evidence that disappeared from the police locker years ago; did that same person frame Mike too?

Merci doesn't want to believe that McNally is involved, but everything points to him. When she is forced to arrest him, everything she believes in comes in for a painful re-examination. And when her efforts to solve both killings lead inexorably back to where they started--to the department itself--she faces the most difficult challenge of all.

Parker is a masterful writer, with a sure command of the idiom, a fine sense of pacing and more emotional depth than many of his colleagues. Fans will applaud this outing, and new readers will seek out his extensive backlist. --Jane Adams, Amazon.com

Review:

‘Genuinely shocking, but much more shocking than most of the genre’s output’
– Literary Review

‘A superior thriller’
– Mail on Sunday

‘Jefferson Parker is a powerhouse writer’
– New York Times Book Review

‘The crimes are sickening, the killer is a monster and the gadgets of destruction are truly bizarre. It must be another insanely imaginative thriller from Jefferson Parker’
– New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperFiction
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0007101937
• ISBN 13: 9780007101931
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 432