The Boyfriend by Thomas Perry

Jack Till after his retirement as a LAPD  moved on to become a private investigator.  Most of his cases are routine and don't need his homicide investigation skills.  But now parents of a murdered young woman have come to him to try to find out more about her death.  The LAPD has written it off as a home robbery gone wrong as she was found shot in her home.

Till reluctantly takes the case.  He soon discovers that the woman was a high priced call girl, something her parents never knew.  There aren't many clues about the case but something tells Till there is more to the story than the police found.  He continues to work the case and finds other women who fit the same pattern, call girls, shot at home, with strawberry blonde hair, and most tellingly, all wearing the same necklace.  He realizes there is a serial killer at work.

But this isn't a typical serial killer at work.  Instead, Till has uncovered the pattern of a man who uses escorts as his hiding place while he sets up high price assassinations in different cities.  The women all think that he is in love with them but his main interest is having a place to live during his weeks of investigation of his targets, a place the police won't uncover when he kills his high publicity targets.  The women are killed as an afterthought to keep from leaving witnesses.

Now Till and the killer are in a cat and mouse game as Till looks for new escorts that the killer might use in different cities.  His former work as an LAPD buys him some cooperation from the various police forces as he moves from city to city following the killer.  Can he find the man and stop him before more women and targets are killed?

Perry is always a satisfying read for mystery lovers.  His plots aren't so fantastic that the reader can easily see where things just wouldn't work that way which is a common failing in mysteries.  His knowledge of police procedure rings true and his plots have enough twists and turns to keep the reader involved.  This book is recommended for mystery readers.