End of Watch, by Stephen King

This is the last in the Mr. Mercedes series, which King started out as a project in noir crime fiction. I'd say he got pretty far away from that genre, especially in this latest novel. Nonetheless, it's a good story, with lovable characters -- and a tinge of horror and fantasy. Lots of suspense, of course. Definitely worth reading for entertainment.

Finders Keepers, by Stephen King

A sequel to Mr. Mercedes.

This, like almost everything I've ever read by Mr. King, did not disappoint.

It's the story of a family that was affected by the tragedy central to the plot of Mr. Mercedes.  In particular, it's about a young man who literally finds buried treasure, and uses it to help his family. When the burier of the treasure is released from prison prematurely, the plot picks up speed.

And When She Was Good, by Laura Lippman

The story of Helen/Heloise Lewis, a rather secret person who leads a very complicated life. Helen is a young woman with an abusive father who leaves home with a young man who is no better. Later in life we find Heloise, nee Helen, running a successful "escort service." She has, along the way, made some questionable decisions and involved herself with some very dangerous people. All of this is beginning to come together as we enter this captivating novel. I read this in a weekend, it was just great.

The Whites, by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt

New York Times review

This is a very good novel about the life and times of a New York City police detective. Sgt. Billy Graves runs the Night Watch, and the Night Watch runs him.

The Big Seven, by Jim Harrison

...People from his class never spent a hundred dollars an hour to toalk to a shrink.... it was thought to be a scam. Only lawyers got that much.

...One professor used to like to quote Faulkner as saying "Keats 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of broken-hearted old ladies." Hemingway was ruthless with his children but would head to bed with a case of sniffles. Sunderson always thought Hemingway wrote very well but if you peeked under the covers you saw one of the worst pricks in the history of literature. Faulkner stayed home and drank and wasn't into serial marriages...

...what could you do about a fourteen-year-old boy who would commit cold-blooded murder? The paper failed to mention whether he was a Boy Scout or a junior member of the NRA. There were no clues other than the implicit one that he was a member of a culture dying of dry rot...

Back in the fifth grade each student had received a packet of Audubon cards resembling baseball cards but with photos of birds rather than players, and they were let out into the woods to match them to what they saw. An oriole was a prize sighting. Some boys cheated and sat around in the woods smoking cigarettes. He told his dad about this and his dad had said, "Once a cheat, always a cheat." He had pondered what this meant and came up with not much because he had noticed that cheaters seemed to do well at everything and being one might well prepare you for a career in business.

Another rough, drunken Sundersen novel by Jim Harrison. This one is a sequel to the one I just read, Great Leader. In it, Sundersen acquires a hunting cabin with a nearby family of backwoods people who are vodka-swilling armed maniacs, to be generous. A merry series of events ensue.

Damon Runyon, by Jimmy Breslin

Damon Runyon was a journalist, poet, author, and playwright. He wrote of the Roaring Twenties, and brought Broadway and New York City and its characters of that era to life. Jimmy Breslin, a colorful and popular journalist and writer of the later twentieth century writes the life of his predecessor.

Runyon grew up in Pueblo, Colorado, and was apparently drinking like an alcoholic and smoking like a chimney before he was a teenager. His drinking became so bad that eventually he quit, and in later life wrote of his appreciation for AA, although his own sobriety predated the birth of that program by about 20 years.

In writing about Runyon's career, Breslin talks of graft and corruption in a very casual manner. His attitude seems to be that this stuff is everywhere, and pretty much always has been, and that we shouldn't be surprised by it. His own analysis of history would be one of theft and greed.

An interesting bit from the middle of the book (pp185-186) describes "[New York City's] drug panic of 1919." This was also the time when influenza was killing thousands all over the world, including in that city. Louis Harris, "a doctor who was chief of the city's Bureau of Preventable Diseases...found that groups of doctors and nurses were shoving aone another to enter houses where the sick inside had cash..." Harris said " 'The socialization of the medical and nursing professions to place them under government control should no longer be deferred."  Harris's opinion was not too welcome. " 'When he went to medical school, he failed stethoscope,' Esdail (Doc) Cohen of the New York World said."

"...on April 8, 1919, the first federal drug agents in the nation raided six physicians and four druggists who were prescribing opium, cocaine and heroin to people purportedly in need of hop as medicine. That weekend...two thousand addicts walked into Bellevue Hospital...and begged for help. By Monday, the hospital opened a drug treatment center, alarming doctors, who saw it as another attempt to establish socialized medicine..."

From page 187:

"...the state planned to open a long-term treatment center at Mount Lebanon Shaker Village... 'These people should get treatment all right,' a Bellevue doctor announced. 'They should get treated to jail.' "
"Dr. Royal Copeland, the New York City health commissioner, reported, 'Over 95 percent of all drug addicts have shown, by their acts, a non-appreciation of the service, and have repeatedly attempted to be discharged before the end of their treatment. It is, therefore, recommended that the Department of Health discontinue any sort of drug treatment program.' "

Runyon observed this through the point of view of Arnold Rothstein, a gangster. "[Rothstein] decided to provide an orderly distribution of drugs by a professional criminal, himself. He told Frank Costello, 'There can't be much wrong with them. Nobody cares.' "

From page 188:

"Rothstein was the nation's first major underworld distributor of drugs. The first federal drug agent in New York, Max Roder, always said the biggest name he had on his list as a dealer was Arnold Rothstein. 'Every time you mentioned his name in the office, five people on his payroll went to the phone to call him up.' "

Runyon's life was colorful, to say the least. He saw the first half of the twentieth century in all its iniquity and glory, and wrote about sports, gangsters, and his beloved Broadway.

Girl on a Train, by Paula Hawkins

This book contains pure evil. It's a very effective thriller, captivating, written in an innovative style that suits the subject matter very well.

Rachel is the girl on the train, a young woman who rides to London, passing the same houses every day. On the terrace of one of them, she frequently observes a young couple whose life seems idyllic. That changes.

Furthermore, we learn much more about Rachel, as well as the other principle characters in this book, and we are led expertly down the path of mystery and suspense to its amazing conclusion.

Great Leader, by Jim Harrison

...

NY Times review

This is the first book I've read by Jim Harrison. His writing is unusual. There's a kind of economy to it that can be just a little confusing. He doesn't waste words on transition; a character will move from one place to another, one action to another, one time to another, with little or no explanation. Several times I had to stop and go back to see what I had missed, and usually discovered that I had missed nothing--I was simply being challenged to use my head to figure out what's going on. In general, I like this in an author; I don't enjoy reading unnecessary reams of exposition, but maybe Mr. Harrison overdoes it a little.

The story is pretty good. I like the Upper Peninsula Michigan setting, the cold and bleak images of Lake Superior, its role as a sort of symbol for evil in the book. Sunderson is a State Police detective who retires soon after the story begins, but who continues to hunt down his last suspect, a religious cult leader that he sometimes calls the Great Leader. The Great Leader's main transgression is statutory rape: he likes to have intercourse with underage girls who join the cult. He also welcomes adult women as long as they have lots of money to donate.

Sunderson is a complicated person, probably an alcoholic, although his personal brand of alcoholism doesn't exactly ring true, and I have a little expertise in this area. He is extremely sexually active for a 65-year-old man, and doesn't seem to have much in the way of moral compunction. Add to this his habit of spying on his 16-year-old female neighbor Mona, and it's a little difficult to see exactly from where his intense moral outrage against the Great Leader comes. Perhaps it's one of those instances where we hate others the most when they remind us of ourselves.

Bleeding Hearts, by Ian Rankin

This is not an Inspector Rebus novel. It is, instead, a novel told partly in first person by a hired assassin, and partly in third person about the private detective who pursues him from England to America.

After a few Rebuses, I was disappointed to find myself noticing some cardboard-cutout characters, and not-so-great writing.

I did read the whole thing. It was well-plotted, even including a religious cult, and a fictional account of a real-time financial error made in the time of Manuel Noriega and the Iran-Contra scandal.

New York Times review.

Tatiana, by Martin Cruz Smith

A novel in the Arkady Renko series. This is set in post-Soviet Russia. Renko begins an unauthorized investigation into the death of Tatiana Petrovna, an investigative reporter not loved by those in power, who died falling from a window. Her death is generally considered a suicide, but Renko has doubts.

At the beginning of the book, we witness the murder of a translator who has been working for a group of wealthy businessmen. The translator keeps a coded notebook, which was in the possession of Tatiana Petrovna before her death.

Set against a backdrop of cynical corruption, Renko's investigation requires a persistence that borders on insanity. Indeed, one of the characters describes him as "Sisyphean."

A New York Times review says "In “Tatiana,” his eighth crime novel dominated by the lawless landmass once known as the Soviet Union, Martin Cruz Smith sets his Slavic sleuth, Arkady Renko, on the case."

The Paying Guests by Susan Waters

Set in the years soon after World War I, this novel evokes a time when many aspects of life were still what we would consider primitive. For example, the home that is central to the plot does not have an indoor lavatory or commode; its residents visit an outhouse in the garden. The mother and daughter around whom the plot develops, Mrs. Wray and Frances, have lost much in the war, including Frances' two brothers. Her father died soon afterward, though not as a result of military action.

The Wrays, short on funds, do a bit of remodeling and advertise for boarders, "paying guests." The couple that move in provide an instant accelerant to the plot, which becomes very fascinating and tense when one of the paying guests is found murdered near the house.

This was thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining, and gave what I believe to be a good picture of what life in England might have been like at this period of time. Furthermore, the issue of homosexuality at this time is dealt with, and we are shown a plausible image of how it might have been to be gay or lesbian then.



Sarah Waters' website

Mr. Mercedes, by Stephen King

Yep. Another Stephen King. This one is pretty much a pure detective-adventure novel. It features a retired detective named Bill Hodges, who had investigated a bizarre mass murder committed by an unknown person who drove a large Mercedes Benz 12-cylinder sedan into a crowd of people waiting in line to get into a job fair. The murder was unsolved at the time of Hodges' retirement.

When we meet Hodges, he has settled into an uneasy routine of mostly doing nothing, watching afternoon TV (a show is described that sounds a lot like Jerry Springer), and  contemplating suicide with his father's .38 calibre revolver.

Hodges receives a letter from someone who claims to be "Mr. Mercedes," the murderer in question, and seems to be goading Hodges toward suicide by taunting him with his failure to identify and apprehend the killer.

The investigation and subsequent action build up to speed quickly. Several interesting characters come into the plot, including one Olivia Trelawney, the owner of the car (it was stolen from her, there is no doubt, but there is some belief that she may have left the key in its ignition, thereby making the murderer's job a little easier). Trelawney's sister Janey comes on the scene as well, and is an important part of the story.

One remarkable thing about this book: it is a detective novel, no more, no less. There are no aliens, no supernatural beings, no other dimensions of reality. There is no time travel, no element of weirdness or horror other than those found in real human beings. There is plenty of evil in the character of Mr. Mercedes (we find out who he really is before long), but it is the evil of real life: he is a psychopath.

New York Times review

Reversal, by Michael Connelly

An audio book.

In this novel, Harry Bosch and Mickey Haller, half-brothers (as we discovered in an earlier novel) are brought together again. Mickey Haller, the "Lincoln Lawyer," has always been a defense lawyer, and one who is particularly disliked by Los Angeles prosecutors, as he has an excellent track record of winning his cases. At the beginning of this story, however, Haller is approached by a representative of the DA's office and is asked to take a case -- for the people, as a special prosecutor.

Jason Jessup is the convicted murderer of a young girl, who has been in prison for the crime for 25 years. DNA evidence recently introduced has caused enough doubt about his conviction that he is to have a new trial. This is the case Haller is called to prosecute. Mickey is unsure exactly why the DA wants him, of all people, to take the case. There is an implication of sloppy or improper work on the original trial that may at least partially explain why Haller is a good choice -- or, is this a complicated political move wherein he will be used as a pawn?

Haller decides to take the case, but only if his ex-wife Maggie "McFierce" McPherson, a career prosecutor, will be assigned as his assistant. Furthermore, he insists on recruiting Harry Bosch as his investigator.

Good reviews and expositions exist.  I will only say that this is a terrific story, and a masterful use of the characters that Connelly has created in the Bosch and Haller series.

Wikipedia page

Official Michael Connelly page

NY Times review

The Heart of the Matter, by Graham Greene

An audio book.

Ah, Graham Greene again. What a pool of calm and good sense one enters into when reading one of his books.

This is the story of Major Scoby, a policeman in West Africa during World War II. The vicissitudes of war, the clash of cultures, the threats of disease and violence, are ever present, yet Scoby presents himself as a model of reason and rectitude.

Scoby is a Catholic, which is of course the heart of many of Greene's matters, but in the course of this novel he finds himself grimly at odds with his religion, and in danger of losing his soul. In the end, we are presented with an intensely sad and difficult paradox, which left me wondering how, exactly, Greene felt about his religion.

This is such a beautifully written piece of work that I hope to acquire it on paper and read it again.

Little Demon in the City of Light, by Steven Levingston

Washington Post Review

Maureen read this book and recommended it to me.

It's interesting in many ways, and wasn't much of a chore to read. A glimpse of the 1890s, a time when civilization was in transition. Hypnotism and early neurology plays a part in this story, in which a young woman, Gabrielle Bompard,  has been an accomplice to murder, and the question arises, was she controlled by her lover, Michel Eyraud? Had he hypnotized her, instructing her to assist in the foul deed, effectively removing her will, and thereby making her innocent by reason of hypnosis? Had his post-hypnotic suggestions caused her to lie and fail to remember important details of the case?

For me, the entire story was overshadowed by the horror of the guillotine, which was still in use at the time. There is something especially evil about State-sanctioned murder, even when done in revenge for a crime as horrid as the one committed in this story.

Full Dark, No Stars, by Stephen King

This book contains four stories:

• 1922 -- Murder on the plains, and its consequences.
• Big Driver -- a writer returning from a public appearance has bad luck on the road.
• Fair Extension -- in which one of literature's more classic characters makes an appearance.
• A Good Marriage -- a wife finds out more than she would like to about her husband.

Stephen King is someday going to be known as a great writer of our time. Unfortunately, I think he's been given short shrift by the literary community, probably considered a "genre" writer, and isn't seriously considered to be among the current greats. No matter: I have spent some genuinely wonderful hours reading King's work, and this book was everything I could have hoped it to be. 

King has perhaps matured, or cooled down, or become a little less fantastic in his storytelling; but I wish to say that such great works of fantasy as "It," "The Stand,"  "Salem's Lot," or "The Shining" lose nothing by their inclusion of forces and beings from dimensions not normally experienced in reality. For that matter, "The Shining" was not driven by fantasy so much as alcoholism, and a terrible dementia no less real for having been vividly described. 

Full Dark, No Stars contains almost no ghosts. The gentleman in "Fair Extension" may be fantastic, but his existence has been fairly well accepted by human beings for many centuries. Instead, this book has, in King's own words, "ordinary people in extraordinary situations." (from the Afterword) 

I have tried my best in Full Dark, No Stars to record what people might do, and how they might behave, under certain dire circumstances. The people in these stories are not without hope, but they acknowledge that even our fondest hopes ... may sometimes be vain. ...nobility ... resides ... in trying to do the right thing ... when we fail ... hell follows. (ibid)

I know from other readings that King has a background of New England Protestant religion, and whether or not he personally believes in Hell, I know that its geography is familiar to him. King is a journeyman writer, who has literally written more books than I have been able to read, and I admire him beyond measure.

I can't recommend this book strongly enough. Go get it, and read it. Enjoy.

Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane

Mystic River is a good mystery, and a terrific novel. Its characters and setting are irresistible. Lehane's skill is awesome; he manages to write exactly what I want to read: a novel that creates a world that draws me in, a world that I am loath to leave behind when I read the last page and put the book down.

We are introduced to the three main characters in their childhood. Sean Devine, Jimmy Marcus, and Dave Boyle are pre-teens living in what is probably a part of Greater Boston which Lehane calls Buckingham. There is an incident, Dave is kidnapped by two men, but he escapes several days later and is returned to the neighborhood.

Many years and events later, the three are brought together by tragedy. Sean has become a State Trooper. Jimmy is an ex-con who owns a store, and Dave has a nondescript job about which we hear little. As the action begins, explodes, and the investigation and mystery progress, we learn more and more about these three men, their families, and their past and present lives. They become more and more real, more three-dimensional.

The mystery itself is a good one. I can brag that I figured it out at about the 70% point, but that didn't spoil it for me, as I couldn't really be sure. And the mystery, while it's every bit true to the form and strong enough to stand alone, is not all there is to this book. We are every bit as involved in the nature and lives of these men, and how they will each deal with what life has dealt them.

While I enjoyed Moonlight Mile quite a bit, I think that Mystic River better reveals the talent of this powerful writer.

A Publisher's Weekly review of the book

The Mystic River entry in Wikipedia (about the river, not the book -- but see the "disambiguation page" for more)

IMDb entry for the movie made of Mystic River

A New York Times review of the movie

A New York Times Sunday Book Review interview with Dennis Lehane

The Girl Who Played With Fire, by Stieg Larsson

Christopher Hitchens on Stieg Larsson

The second in the famous, popular, and excellent trilogy by the late Mr. Larsson. What a legacy.

No Country For Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

Vintage International 309 pages. ISBN 978-0-307-38713-4

No Country For Old Men starts out with a short stream-of consciousness narrative, as if Sheriff Bell were talking to us, or we could read his thoughts. These italicized segments will be repeated throughout the book, and one will provide its epilogue.

Sheriff Bell, we discover, has been the Sheriff of his county for many years. He is a man who appreciates the peace and simplicity of his own life, and has a strong love for his wife, to whom he has been married for many years. Bell is in many ways a very traditional good American man, who served his country in World War II, and came back home to be a peace officer in the place where he grew up.

Bell is monogamous, not overly religious, and exhibits a calm, pragmatic tolerance of other people who may or may not be much like him. It would have been easy to write more prejudice into this character, to make him a little more of the typical “redneck” small-town sheriff; McCarthy has created a much more complex character here, a man that we will know, recognize, and like. Bell is the man we wish we had directing our local law enforcement, wherever we live.

In the beginning of the book, a man named Moss, out hunting in the desert, comes upon the scene of a grisly multiple murder that's taken place around several abandoned vehicles. There are dead bodies, weapons, and drugs. In one vehicle is a man who has been shot but is not dead, to whom Moss speaks. This man calls Moss cuate (friend, compadre) and asks for agua. Moss has no water, and is too cautious and fascinated to simply go for help at that moment.

Moss follows the tracks of an injured man who crawled away from the scene, and finds him dead, with a bag “level full of hundred dollar bills... His whole life was sitting there in front of him. Day after day from dawn till dark until he was dead. All of it cooked down into forty pounds of paper in a satchel.”

This money, which Moss takes, drives the story to its end. It is, of course, the proceeds from a drug deal that went horribly wrong. Moss, who we find to be a simple and generally honest man devoted to his young wife is instantly possessed by the spell of lucre, the awesome possibilities that these millions of dollars represent, the vision of freedom from dull and difficult work. He has practically no resistance, although we are given strong hints that he sees the seeds of his own destruction herein. Moss knows full well that he has scant chance of getting away with this treasure, but the reward is just too great for him not to try.

The lure of all that money doesn't completely corrupt Moss. He returns later, in the night, with water for the man in the car, but it is too late. As he runs with the satchel of money he demonstrates that he has not lost his strong set of principles. He is as kind as he can afford to be; he is loyal to his wife.

There are many evil men in this book, but none with evil so pure as Chigurh. Chigurh is presented as a heartless, soulless murderer; he comes into the story by killing a young deputy in a county next to Bell's. As he moves through the story he leaves a trail of victims, some shot to death, some killed with an air-powered hammer designed to slaughter cattle.

Chigurh obviously takes pleasure in killing, but he is not killing solely for pleasure. He seeks the money that Moss has found, hoping that by recovering it he can gain the trust and business of the mysterious drug cartel whose ill-fated transaction in the desert caused the scene that Moss discovered. He represents the coldest of the cold; the murdering reptile brain that thrives in the world of drugs.

Moss runs, and is sought by the drug runners, Chigurh, and Sheriff Bell. Bell has put the pieces together, and has a reasonably accurate idea of what has transpired. Reason and logic, which serve him in understanding the case, also tell him that Moss is very unlikely to survive. (And what will happen to his wife?) He sets out to find, and rescue him – an impossible task that he cannot refuse to try. Bell's wife asks him: “Do you really care?” To which Bell answers:

“Yes mam. I do. The people of Terrell County hired me to look after em... I get paid to be the first one hurt. Killed, for that matter. I'd better care.”

There is a struggle in this book, but even more there is despair. Bell, consulting with his deputy, Torbert, says this about the drug runners:

“...I used to say they were the same ones we've always had to deal with. Same ones my grandaddy had to deal with. Back then they was rustlin cattle. Now they're runnin dope. But I don't know as that's true no more. I'm like you. I ain't sure we've seen these people before. Their kind. I dont know what to do about em even. If you killed em all they'd have to build an annex on to hell.”

Bell could be described as a conservative, but that would be an oversimplification. Bell certainly believes in what we might term “traditional” moral values, but he brings his own personality, a sort of horrified acceptance of what is coming to pass, to the discussion. He tells of a discussion with a woman who complains about the “right wing,” and says “I want my granddaughter to be able to have an abortion.” Bell says:

“...I don't have much doubt but what she'll be able to have an abortion. I'm goin to say that not only will she be able to have an abortion, she'll be able to have you put to sleep. Which pretty much ended the conversation.”

McCarthy writes much of this book in a vernacular that seems appropriate for the people, and the place, in a way that is easy and pleasant to read. I devoured this book on a rainy Sunday several weeks ago. After a couple of hours I cancelled my plans for the day and read it to the end. I am not sorry for doing that.

This is a skillfully told story, in the tradition of the Western, but addressing one of the major questions of modern civilization: What have we done? We have created this wealthy, technologically enhanced existence (at least for those of us in America, much of Europe, and the rest of the “developed” world), at the expense of decency, community, and perhaps even humanity. Drug addiction, and the soulless criminals that supply the addicts, make up the basis for a profound symptom of the rot growing within our numbers. Again, from Bell:

“I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics.”

And this:

“I think I know where we're headed. We're bein bought with our own money. And it aint just the drugs... Money that can buy whole countries ... it will put you in bed with people you ought not to be there with. It's not even a law enforcement problem. I doubt that it ever was...

...I told a reporter...It starts when you begin to overlook bad manners... It reaches into ever strata...You finally get into the sort of breakdown in mercantile ethics that leaves people settin around out in the desert dead in their vehicles and by then it's just too late.”

By the end of No Country for Old Men I felt very close to Sheriff Bell and his view of the world. I believed in Chigurh and the evil he symbolizes, and I understood the futility of looking at it as a “law enforcement problem.”

Furthermore, I look forward to reading more books by Cormac McCarthy. This was my first.

12,13,24 April 2008

©Eric F. Lester 2008

Back Story, by Robert B. Parker

G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York. 2003. 291 pages



This is a Spenser novel, one of the series of thirty or more, featuring characters well-known to those of us who have read so many of these. Hawk, Susan Silverman, Quirk, Spenser, and yet another Pearl (I don't know what happened to Pearl I, in a novel I didn't read), the dog.

Spenser is a private detective living in Boston. Susan is his love, a respected psychiatrist. Hawk is a "criminal genius," a former covert operative of vague and mysterious roots, an African-American keenly aware of the tension between races in our society who will be reading impenetrable scientific literature in one scene, only to respond with the worst shuck-and-jive language ("sho nuf") in the next.


Spenser is nothing less than a Samurai. He is strong, brave, skilled at warfare beyond belief, and possessed of a powerful sense of right and wrong. People come to him who have been wronged, treated unfairly, by powers that they are too weak to overcome, and Spenser sets out to correct the injustice.

In this novel Spenser is approached by a young woman, Daryl, through the intercession of his adopted son Paul Giacomin. Daryl's mother was killed in a bank robbery in Boston in 1974; this story is placed somewhere in more current times, probably at the beginning of the twenty-first century. (My, it's strange to write that.) It was never discovered who exactly shot her mother to death, there is a cloud of mystery and a hint of cover-up over the crime. This is essential Spenser. He goes to work.

Through the story he unravels the facts of the case, not without risking his life and those of his friends, and killing several of the enemy who try to keep him from the truth. He uncovers a complicated intrigue involving organized crime and the FBI, which I will not explain out of a desire not to spoil the mystery for those who have not yet read this delicious book.

There is a strange and bittersweet ending, a sort of shifting of resolution that I found interesting, even realistic. But make no mistake, this is rich fantasy, pure escape fiction: There are no Spensers walking the face of this planet. No woman is as beautiful or tolerant as Silverman, no friend as powerful, connected and brave as Hawk. No cops (including the FBI) so impotent and frustrated, or at worst corrupt and evil, connected to the mob or mired in cover-ups of their own mistakes. There will be no resolution of this puzzle without Spenser's intervention.

At the end of the battle the Samurai sheaths his sword. The field is littered with dead bodies. The world is still evil, but he has inserted some balance, neutralized some threats. He has done what he set out to do, but we are not sure if Daryl will know the details of who killed her mother. She has, according to the formula, opted out, told Spenser to stop looking, she doesn't want to know any more. But Spenser did not stop once he had begun; he leaves no job unfinished.


This is escape fiction at its best, with a few thought-provoking threads woven through it. Parker has something to say about the hippies and the anti-establishment movement in the seventies, the dope-smoking culture, and the modern hangers-on who live in this past, rolling joints and cursing the Man. Over-simplified it may be, but he makes his case: if you want to change the world, you'd better be ready to get hurt and hurt some others, you'd better have a good plan and the means to execute it. Self-reliance is what Spenser is about: he knows exactly whom he can trust.

Parker is also interested in the discomfort we feel when we are inescapably faced with racial issues. He contrasts Spenser's invulnerable bond with the equally invulnerable Hawk, and their superiority to prejudicial thinking expressed through their black-and-white ribbing, their comedic take on the whole "what color am I" issue, with the stark hatred and rejection between whites and blacks that drives essential elements of this plot.

It is also important to mention that in this novel Spenser meets Jesse Stone, the police chief of Paradise, Massachusetts. Stone is the star of another excellent series by Parker, which has had some success adapted for television -- as did the Spenser series in the past.

If you haven't had the pleasure of reading Robert B. Parker, wait no longer. There is a pile of great reading here, you can't go wrong.

Some other than official Robert B. Parker Web Sites:

Bullets and Beer
A Parker Biography on Kirjasto (Pegasos, at www.kirjasto.sci.fi.)
A Parker Article at bookreporter.com
New York Times Article
Wikipedia Entry (includes more links)