MISSING PERSONS is the first book in the new Buddy Steel mystery series by New York Times best selling author, Michael Brandman.
Steel...smart, aggressive, ironic, spare and cynical...has been content working homicide at the LAPD until his father, the legendary Sheriff Burton Steel, falls ill with Lou Gehrig's disease. Sheriff Steel is headquartered in Freedom, a privileged coastal community located a hundred miles north of Los Angeles. His health failing, he asks his son Buddy to come home to cover his back and to groom him to be his successor.
Buddy reluctantly agrees. He returns to Freedom despite having outgrown its small town limits, wary of his father's authoritarianism.
No sooner does he hit town than Buddy learns the wife of the high-flying star of a Freedom based world-renowned television ministry has gone missing. A visit to the woman's home leads to a hostile confrontation with her husband's family and Buddy's realization that something greater than simply a missing person is at stake.
Allegiance between father and son provides the backdrop for Buddy's complex investigation of twisted families, avaricious con artists, violent gangs, drugs, corruption, and murder. And added to the mix is an enigmatic femme fatale who succeeds in upending Buddy's tenets regarding contemporary relationships.
MISSING PERSONS is its own book, yet crime fiction fans will find it a joy to trace its literary lineage from Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker through to Sue Grafton and Michael Connelly.
The woman on the bed was barely out of her teens. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but she’d tried to make the most of her looks. And now, alone in a seedy beachfront motel, she was dead.
Paradise Police Chief Jesse Stone doesn’t know her name. Whoever she is, she didn’t deserve to die. Jesse starts digging, only to find himself caught in the crosshairs of a bitter turf war between two ruthless pimps. And more blood will spill before it’s over.
Autumn in Paradise, Massachusetts, is usually an idyllic time-but not this year. A Hollywood movie company has come to town, and brought with it a huge cast, crew, and a troubled star. Marisol Hinton is very beautiful, reasonably talented, and scared out of her wits that her estranged husband's jealousy might take a dangerous turn. When she 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. There's murder in the air, and Jesse's reputation as an uncompromising defender of the law-and his life-are on the line.
The Jesse Stone stories continue even after Robert B. Parker's passing with Killing the Blues. In this novel, Jesse Stone is faced with what begins as a rash of stolen cars and escalates into arson and murder as Stone uncovers how deep this crime wave really goes. All the while, Paradise, Massachusetts is preparing for summer tourism with the help of event planner Alexis Richardson, and she and Stone become involved in a steamy affair.
