Red Light (Signed/First Edition/Association Copy)

A Los Angeles Times #1 bestseller!

Two years after the death of Tim Hess, her partner and father of her child, Merci Rayborn, the Orange County homicide investigator introduced in Parker's "insanely imaginative" (The New York Times Book Review) The Blue Hour, is back. Merci has finally gotten her life together. She and her son are living with her father, a retired cop, and she is dating Mike McNally, a respected fellow officer. When a young prostitute is found murdered and Mike emerges as the primary suspect, Mercy must do the unthinkable--expose and arrest her lover.

Meet Sergeant Merci Rayborn of the Orange County (California) sheriff's office. She's honest, courageous, clever, determined, quietly desperate, and unforgettable. Introduced by Parker in 1998's The Blue Hour, she is still, two years later, destabilized by what happened to her back then: Her lover was murdered, and in a bloody battle, she gunned down the sociopath who killed him. At work now, she functions with her customary efficiency, but her heart is in deep-freeze, her emotional life comatose. When an exotic young call girl becomes a homicide victim, Merci catches the case. Almost from the first, it's disturbingly clear that the leading suspect will turn out to be a cop. Not just any cop, but Mike McNally, the one Merci's involved with, the one her inner woman has been counting on to wake Sleeping Beauty. The evidence accumulates, and no matter how she squirms to dodge the implications, Merci's investigation keeps pointing to Mikeand then, suddenly, not just to him but to other colleagues she respects and trusts, and finally to an ex-cop she loves: her father. Clinging to her sense of what matters most, Merci finally cracks her case, only to be confronted with choices painful enough to make her wish she hadn't. An admirably constructed police procedural that's also an unsparing examination of a gallant woman's search for a moral code worth the commitment. (Author tour)-- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The murders of two prostitutes 30 years apart provide the framework for this fine crime melodrama about police corruption and political ambition in Southern California's Orange County. The sequel to 1997's The Blue Hour finds homicide detective Merci Rayborn investigating the shooting death of a young hooker. As much as Rayborn hates to admit it, the primary suspect is her own boyfriend, Sgt. Mike McNally, who was a close friend of the prostitute, but claims he never had sex with her. As Rayborn struggles with the emotions of having to expose and arrest her lover, her boss drops another case on her--the unsolved 1969 slaying of another prostitute, found dead in an empty field. Rayborn wonders why such a seemingly simple case was never solved. The more she plows into it, however, the uglier it gets. Details suggest that corrupt political leaders and cops conspiring on a shady development deal may have committed the murder. And, oddly, some of the principals in that event seem to be reemerging in the case against McNally. Parker's latest sizzles along, an infectious blend of atmosphere, action and passion. Longtime fans will recognize formulaic twists and secondary story lines that the author has used before, but the plot stays fresh as it weaves between present and past. Particularly effective is Parker's recreation of Orange County's growth spurt in the 1960s, when unbridled development, backroom land deals and strict political conservatism were the order of the day. And Rayborn, the latest in Parker's line of protagonists with obsessive streaks, impresses as an absorbingly hardheaded hero, one who learns difficult truths about herself as well as about her cases. 7-city author tour. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.