From Publishers Weekly
At the start of Parker's engaging sixth Sunny Randall novel (after
Blue Screen), the cop-turned-PI helps her father track down a
Boston serial killer whose depredations begin again after a 20-year
hiatus. The "spare change" killer executes victims with a single
shot to the head, leaving three coins near the body. Sunny's dad,
Phil, headed the old task force formed to catch the killer, who
wrote Phil taunting letters as the killings piled up. A new killing
and a fresh letter to Phil have him and Sunny serving as consultant
and assistant respectively to a new task force. Gutsy Sunny takes
the lead in identifying the most likely suspect, and then in playing
him dangerously to get hard evidence. Parker's signature bantering
byplay and some borrowings of characters from other series (notably
Susan Silverman from the Spenser novels) will delight fans. The
outcome is never in doubt, but Parker hits most of the right notes,
and there's still ingenuity to his cat-and-mouse.
From Booklist
The victims, dispatched with a single shot to the back of the head,
are not assaulted or molested in any way and share no defining
characteristics. Their bodies are decorated with a few coins. Most
troubling to the Boston PD is the time elapsed between the two most
recent victims: 20 years. The city was terrorized by the Spare
Change killer two decades ago, and Phil Randall headed the task
force that came up dry. Now he's been asked to come out of
retirement to consult on the new killings. He asks his daughter,
private investigator and former cop Sunny Randall, to join him. A
suspect emerges, but there is no physical evidence to tie him to the
killings, only Sunny's intuition. Meanwhile, Sunny's relationship
with her ex-husband--for whom she still carries a torch--is moving
to a new plateau as she tries to understand the family dynamics
among her father, mother, sister and herself. Parker, also
responsible for the classic Spenser mystery series and the Jesse
Stone novels, continues to add depth to his characterization of
Randall as he explores her often contradictory feelings about love.
Parker's ruminations on romance are sometimes--not
always--wearisome, but he never fails to entertain with humor and
recurring characters whom we welcome back into our lives like old
friends.