HIGH PROFILE

While trying to solve a delicate murder case, small-town police chief Jesse Stone comes up with a uniquely ingenious way to juggle the two ladies in his life.

Talk-show host Walton Weeks, star of newspapers, radio and television, must have kept his publicist working overtime even unto death. How else to explain the discovery of his corpse hanging from a tree in a quiet park in Paradise? To add insult to injury, Weeks wasn’t even hanged till after he’d bled out from bullet wounds suffered elsewhere—perhaps wherever his assistant Carey Longley, pregnant with his first child, was shot by the same gun before she was dumped in the lower-rent Dumpster behind Daisy Dyke’s restaurant. The obvious suspects—Weeks’s two ex-wives and their most recent successor, his bodyguard, researcher, manager and lawyer—all have alibis, and as Jesse candidly tells the Massachusetts governor, the solution will have to wait for more clues, presumably including the obligatory revelations of past secrets and current sexual peccadilloes. Meanwhile, Jesse’s romance with private eye Sunny Randall (Sea Change, 2006) is frozen by the news that Jenn, the ex-wife he’s never been able to get over, is being stalked by the man who raped her. How to deal with the two rivals? Only Jesse would come up with the sublime solution: He hires Sunny as Jenn’s bodyguard.

If the complications that follow don’t live up to the situation’s promise, even mid-level Parker is always well worth your time and money.