The Boyfriend
In Thomas Perry’s new novel,
The Boyfriend (228 pages, Mysterious
Press, $25), a handsome young-looking guy in his later twenties is murdering
young female escorts in various cities around the country. When the parents of one victim approach
the private detective Jack Till, a former police detective, they seem willing
to pay whatever it will take to find their daughter’s killer.
Jack takes on the case
unwillingly: he’s not sure he can discover anything beyond what the police have
already found. But when he finds
that the police have been slipshod in various ways, he gets more and more
intrigued with the details of this case.
When he discovers that several girls look almost the same—thin
strawberry blonds with blue eyes and distinguishing jewelry—he thinks he is on
the trail of the killer, but still he cannot make any sense of the meaning of
the victims.
After some close calls in
various cities, Jack starts to notice that other murders, often political or
business-oriented, and usually very major murders that are like gang hits, are
happening in the same cities as the escorts' murders and he starts to connect
them.
He figures out that
the murderer somehow hooks up with girls, probably online, and then stays with
them as long as it takes to carry out his real job. And then, before leaving, he kills the girls who have hosted
him so that there is no real record of his even having been in the city.
As the novel progresses, we
get the back story and some of the emotional involvement of the boyfriend
himself and some of his victims.
Perry is great at following out the implications of his tale, and at a
certain point Jack knows he has the murderer cornered, perhaps with a victim
about to be executed, and he is without police back up. That’s when things get really exciting.
Perry is an imaginative
novelist with a hard-bitten style that is hard to resist. I was pleased to happen upon this
novel, and I look forward to reading some of his other nineteen novels.
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