The Boyfriend
*Starred Review* Perry is a master at multiple narrators. Here he juggles the narrative reins between PI Jack Till and hitman Joey Moreland. Till takes a case that the LAPD has given up on: the murder of a high-end prostitute whose killer seems to be targeting women of the same physical type—lissome strawberry blondes—working as female escorts in cities across the country. The parents of the latest victim want to find their daughter’s killer even if the police don’t, and hire Till to help. He quickly determines that the killer is more than just a john; able to ingratiate himself with the various women, he becomes their live-in boyfriend before killing them. But is there more to it than that? Is the killer using the women’s homes as a convenient hiding place while he tends to other business and then, with business concluded, murdering the women to cover his tracks? Till follows Moreland’s nearly invisible trail from L.A. to Phoenix to Boston—usually several crucial steps behind his adversary and realizing in the process that he has become a hitman following a hitman. Perry is a marvelous plotter, and he builds suspense with all the subtlety of a master chef nursing a risotto to buttery perfection, but what really separates him from the thriller field is his ability to fold psychological complexity into the onrushing narrative. In crime fiction, character building is too often an add-on, supplementing the thrust of the plot but never fully integrated with it. In a Perry novel, the two are part and parcel of one another. The suspense is more intense because the characters, heroes and villains, have worked their way so far under our skin. It’s nothing new to call Perry a master of the genre, but it’s no less true for being widely acknowledged.      HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Decades of critical acclaim have made Perry a perennial favorite in libraries. --Bill Ott