The Boyfriend by Thomas Perry

Published by Mysterious Press on March 5, 2013 

The Boyfriend opens with the murder of a beautiful young escort in Los Angeles. Her parents hire Jack Till to find the killer. The reader learns in chapter one that this isn't the only escort the killer has murdered, and it doesn't take Till long to search for similar crimes. Till's pursuit of the killer takes him to Phoenix and Boston and San Antonio before the action returns to California.

To carry out his scheme (there's more to it than murdering prostitutes), the killer becomes an escort's boyfriend so he can stay with her in her residence. He manages to do this over and over in city after city. That's a trick that even Lothario would have trouble pulling off, and it struck me as implausible at best, despite the graduate level course in seduction that Thomas Perry provides. The true motivation for seducing and then killing the temporary girlfriends is even less plausible but I give Perry credit for coming up with an original and clever plot twist.

Till tracks the killer by scouring websites and finding photographs of escorts wearing a distinctive piece of jewelry that the killer has given them. That each soon-to-be-dead escort decided to have a new photograph taken as soon as her boyfriend gave her a necklace struck me as highly unlikely. It's even more unlikely that the killer would allow the photographs to be published on the net, given how carefully he covers his tracks in all other respects.

Perry devotes roughly equal attention to Till and to the killer. Some chapters focus on Till's methodical investigation and some describe the killer's methodical planning. All of that is moderately interesting (if not particularly exciting) and the story moves quickly.  The plot follows the formula of slasher movies:  naughty girls die while the audience wonders what's in store for the not-so-naughty girl who is with the killer in the end.  That's just too predictable to be enthralling.

Although a portion of the novel is devoted to the killer's backstory, he doesn't have much personality. Till's own backstory seems pieced together, bits carved out of other thriller protagonists and transplanted into Till so that he seems to have a life. There is nothing about Till that makes him stand out in the universe of thriller heroes.

The Boyfriend didn't grab me and hold me in a tight grip, nor did it give me much to think about, as do my favorite thrillers. The plot is surprisingly simple. I formed no connection to the characters and had little reason to care about them. Till is busy being stalwart, the killer is busy killing, and the hookers are busy dying. Still, I kept wondering what would happen next. In that sense the novel is more intellectually interesting than emotionally engaging.  In short, The Boyfriend is an easy read, but it isn't Perry's best effort. Nothing about this thriller is unlikable, but nothing makes it stand out.

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