Ken Ray

A young gunslinger is changed for the better by meeting a beautiful woman. A classic range-war Western, this novel features that powerful, romantic, strangely compelling vision of the American West for which L'Amour's fiction is known. In the author's words, "It was a land where nothing was small, nothing was simple. Everything, the lives of men and the stories they told, ran to extremes."

It’s been a long time since Jesse Stone left L.A., and still longer since the tragic injury that ruined his chances for a major league baseball career. When Jesse is invited to a reunion of his old Triple-A team at a hip New York City hotel, he is forced to grapple with his memories and regrets over what might have been. He left more behind him than unresolved feelings about the play that ended his baseball career. The darkly sensuous Kayla, his former girlfriend and current wife of an old teammate is there in New York...

Hired by Loudon Tripp, an aggrieved Boston aristocrat who believes his late wife Olivia's brutal street slaying to be something other than random violence, Spencer immediately senses that his client's picture-perfect portrayal of his family life is false. For starters, the victim's reputation is too saintly, her house is as lived-in as a stage set, and her troubled children don't appear to be the product of a happy home.

After a busted marriage kicks his drinking problem into overdrive and the LAPD unceremoniously dumps him, 35-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 wondering if this job is a genuine chance to start over, the kind of offer he can't refuse. Once on board, Jesse doesn't have to look for trouble in Paradise: It comes to him. For what is on the surface a quiet New England community quickly proves to be a crucible of political and moral corruption.

Spenser's girlfriend Susan goes away with another man, Jerry Costigan, the son of a very rich and dangerous criminal. Spenser and his friend, Hawk, go to find Susan. Soon they are in the world of the CIA, guns and murder.