Small vices

Maybe you've drifted away from the Spenser series, now in its twenty-fifth installment, and started paying more attention to the younger fellows--Hiaasen, Mosley, and countless others. Well, it might be a good time to check back in with Parker, who can still sling similes with the best of them. This time the inimitable if aging Spenser (he's a Korean War vet!) shows definite signs of losing a step--he's shot, nearly killed, and must undergo a grueling rehabilitation before tracking down his assassin for round two. Along the way, he investigates the wrongful conviction of a Boston gangbanger who was framed for the murder of a rich college girl. Spenser and longtime lover Susan are still trading quips about relationships, sex, and, this time, adopting a baby, and Spenser and even-longertime pal Hawk are still exchanging knowing nods and meaningful monosyllables as if they were Gary Cooper and Ernest Hemingway. What is it about Spenser and his pals that makes it hard to stay away for long? Certainly, it's not realism. We love the dialogue, but clearly nobody talks that way--we're not tough enough, quick enough, and we certainly can't spout literary allusions well enough. But if we were quick enough, it sure would be fun to talk like Spenser and to hang out with Hawk and Susan, and, let's face it, it might also be fun to beat up the bad guys in our lives every now and then. Spenser lives in the real world and deals with it the way we imagine we would if only we knew how. Hemingway called it grace under pressure, and smirk though we may, it still feels good, even just to read about. --Bill Ott

Spenser returns in top form (his 24th adventure, following Chance) to clear a man wrongly imprisoned for murdering a woman college student. Ellis Alves, a black man with sexual assaults on his record, was convicted easily when two witnesses said they saw him kidnap the victim. Former prosecutor Rita Fiore suspects a frame-up, however, and hires old pal Spenser to investigate. "You gonna get buried," Alves warns Spenser and his sidekick Hawk. Sure enough, reopening the case pits them against the victim's influential parents, her hostile tennis-star boyfriend and his wealthy family, and the state cop who arrested Alves. Four Boston thugs can't force Spenser off the case, but an imported hit man pours several bullets into him. Barely surviving, Spenser emerges from a coma with his gun hand useless. Parker writes a powerful, affecting description of Spenser's painful rehab. The sharp, densely compacted dialogue, a hallmark of this series, exceeds itself here. Even psychologist Susan Silverman's discourse, as she shrink-raps on Spenser's motivation, has a lower than usual pretense quotient. Susan wants to adopt a child with Spenser, but he is determined to risk another clash with the hit man. Spenser, still thoroughly convincing as the tough and decent PI, seeks bits of justice where he can. Even after 23 years on the job (The Godwulf Manuscript, Spenser's first appearance, was published in 1974), nobody does it better. BOMC selection (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Peerless shamus Spenser's 24th case (Chance, 1996, etc.) is almost his last, thanks to an assassin who's a lot more like him than he'd like to acknowledge. Cone, Oakes and Baldwin, Boston's largest law firm, doesn't like loose ends, and when Rita Fiore and Marcy Vance, the former prosecutor who put Ellis Alves away for murder and the former public defender who couldn't save him from the big house, meet in the firm's tony corridors and share doubts about the case, they end up hiring Spenser to make sure the evidence is solid. Nobody, including Alves, a career criminal with an attitude about white folks, wants to talk to Spenser, but it isn't long before he smells several rats anyway. Why didn't the upscale couple (since married) who said they saw Alves drag Pemberton College coed Melissa Henderson into his car call the police till after Melissa was dead? Why would a lowlife like Alves have dumped her body on the well-tended Pemberton campus? Why do the parents of Melissa's boyfriend, tennis hopeful Clint, deny that they ever knew Melissa? Interesting questions--interesting enough to get Spenser the obligatory string of warnings by local thugs and crooked cops and a dead-eyed killer in a gray suit. But Spenser won't lay off, even though his personal shrink Susan Richman, avid to adopt a baby, switches to reminders that Ellis Alves undoubtedly belongs in jail for something. So the Gray Man comes after Spenser with his trademark .22, short-circuiting every surprise (hey, this isn't Nicolas Freeling) except the question of how Spenser's going to recover and nail his would-be executioner and the people who hired him--and then live with himself afterwards. It's a tribute to Parker's professionalism that he takes a device as old as Sherlock Holmes--the death and rebirth of the detective--and infuses it with renewed urgency and moral weight, showing the thoroughbred form that put him and Boston on the p.i. map in the first place. (Book-of-the-Month Club main selection)