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Searching... Sheridan Public Library | Parker, R. Spenser #35 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
When a simple case turns into a treacherous and politically charged investigation, Spenser faces his most difficult challenge yet-keeping his cool while his beloved Susan Silverman is in danger.
Spenser knows something's amiss the moment Dennis Doherty walks into his office. The guy's aggressive yet wary, in the way men frightened for their marriages always are. So when Doherty asks Spenser to investigate his wife Jordan's abnormal behavior, Spenser agrees. A job's a job, after all.
Not surprisingly, Spenser catches Jordan with another man, tells Dennis what he's found out, and considers the case closed. But a couple of days later, all hell breaks loose, and three people are dead. This isn't just a marital affair gone bad. Spenser is in the middle of hornet's nest of trouble, and he's got to get out of it without getting stung. With Hawk watching his back, and gun-for- hire Vinnie Morris providing extra cover, Spenser delves into a complicated and far-reaching operation: Jordan's former lover, Perry Alderson, is the leader of a group that helps sponsor terrorists. But Perry doesn't like Spenser poking around his business, so he decides to get to Spenser through Susan. The Boston P.I. will use all his connections both above and below the law to uncover the truth behind Perry's antigovernment organization. But what Alderson doesn't realize is that Spenser will stop at absolutely nothing to keep Susan out of harm's way; nothing will keep him from the woman he loves.
Author Notes
Robert Brown Parker is an American fiction writer of mysteries. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts and earned his BA degree from Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He went on to earn his master's degree in English literature from Boston University. He started his career working in advertising. After some years, he went back to school to earn his PhD in English from Boston University in 1971. He then began his writng career while teaching at Northeastern University. He decided to become a full-time writer in 1979. His most popular works were the 40 novels written about the private detective Spenser. The ABC Television Network developed the television series "Spenser: For Hire", based on the character in the mid-1980s. Parker also wrote nine novels based on the character Jesse Stone and six novels based on the character Sunny Randall.
On January 18, 2010, Robert Parker died suddenly of a heart attack at his home in Cambridge Massachusetts.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
When a client who suspects his wife is cheating on him is murdered in Parker's 35th snappy Spenser adventure (after Hundred-Dollar Baby), the Boston PI takes it personally, not only because the case resonates with Spenser's past history with love interest Susan, but also because, like Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Spenser feels he can't let a client get murdered without doing something about it. The repartee is up to Parker's high standards, and the detection is hands on and straightforward, with Spenser carrying the load. Since Spenser's aides, including the stalwart Hawke, outclass the heavies, Spenser has time to deal with the mysterious other man, Perry Alderson, whose academic background appears as suspect as his dealings with various subversive groups. This briskly paced cat-and-mouse game offers Spenser fans exactly what they've come to expect from the reliable Parker-no-nonsense action and plenty of romantic give-and-take between Susan and Spenser, who even find the subject of marriage intruding once more. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Spenser, who's become increasingly inclined to retrospection (Hundred-Dollar Baby, 2006, etc.), uses a brush with domestic terrorists to settle a 20-year-old score with Susan Richman. Whatever is bothering his wife, FBI agent Dennis Doherty is certain it isn't sex. And he's right. Professor Jordan Richmond isn't a bit bothered by the frequent sex she's having with visiting professor Perry Alderson--at least not until Spenser gets her and Alderson on tape and plays a strategically edited version of it for her husband. In short order, the cheating wife is dead and the husband is dead, and the hit man who shot the wife is dead at the hands of the colleague Spenser had assigned to tail her. And that's not the worst of it. Doherty dies without learning that the part of the tape he didn't hear revealed that his wife's pillow talk included classified information about his job, and that her lover is an agitator whose organization, Last Hope, aims to hook violent protesters up with materiel. The Boston FBI wants to know how deeply compromised the Bureau has been by Jordan's affair. But Spenser, focused on taking down Alderson himself to resolve his feelings about Susan's long-ago infidelity, hijacks the red-hot political plot down Memory Lane. Parker never reveals Last Hope's nefarious plans. Even so, the first half, before the manly stuff sends the tale up a blind alley, is something special. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
"*Starred Review* In his Spenser novels, when he's writing at the top of his game (which he is here), Parker is like a brilliant musician. From the opening chords which, in just about every Spenser novel, comprise the staging of the first meeting between private-eye Spenser and a troubled client you know you're listening to someone who has absolute command of his work. And it just gets better, as Parker builds his theme, with variations both comic and thrilling. This time out, in the thirty-fifth addition to the series, the troubled client is a husband who feels his wife has been behaving bizarrely. Spenser thinks she's probably having an affair, and through the magic of a planted listening device, he presents the worried husband with the damning evidence. The device has also picked up that the wife's lover is involved in a group called Last Hope, which turns out to be a kind of brokerage outlet for terrorists looking for equipment and other terrorists. The case has moved from the kind of private-eye work that Spenser finds sleazy to one with horrific ramifications. The story itself makes compelling reading on its own, but Parker, as usual, spikes it with caustic wit and the interplay between Spenser and his longtime love, Susan. And here he ups the ante by calling on Spenser to use all his brain and brawn to protect Susan. Terrific."--"Fletcher, Connie" Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
When you read a historical mystery by Jason Goodwin, you take a magic carpet ride to the most exotic place on earth. Like its predecessor, "The Janissary Tree," winner of the Mystery Writers of America's 2007 Edgar Award for best novel, THE SNAKE STONE (Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $25) is set in 19th-century Istanbul during the reign of Sultan Mahmut II and features the subtle sleuthing of Yashim Togalu, a eunuch with eyes and ears exquisitely attuned to the cacophony of life in his cosmopolitan world. But with the sultan on his deathbed after a 30-year reign, a deep unease has settled over the city, now poised uncertainly for a momentous historical shift. In such a setting, sudden violence is just part of the local color. Goodwin obliges with deadly assaults on a local vegetable seller, an old Greek book dealer, an Albanian waterman, a Jewish money-lender and, most interestingly, a French archaeologist whose search for treasure from an earlier era dramatizes the author's view of Istanbul as a city entwined in its own history. Like the Serpent Column in the Hippodrome, the origins of this writhing coil of humanity go back to before the Ottoman Conquest, even before the beginnings of the Byzantine Empire and Greek Constantinople. While Yashim acknowledges that "a city endures which also grows, forever adding new identities to the old," he finds himself digging deeper into the past to understand the murderous impulses of people who would reverse history to stunt such growth. The needless complications of the plot - which sees evil intent in everything from the journals of a learned Greek society to the induction rites of the watermen's guild - actually work in its favor by evoking the chaos of life in the ancient city that straddles the Golden Horn. Goodwin presents this in sumptuous detail, in scenes that take Yashim from the social heights of Topkapi Palace to the dregs of the docks, with a fragrant side trip into the spice market at the Grand Bazaar, source of the ingredients for the elaborate Ottoman dishes he serves his eccentric friend, Stanislaw Palewski, an ambassador of the now-defunct nation of Poland. Their erudite table talk is always lively, as are the conversations Yashim initiates with anyone who has a story to tell. These exchanges don't always have anything to do with the plot, but they provide the nicest kind of traveling music for that magic carpet ride. You couldn't ask for a more gracious introduction to the exotic world of Imperial Japan than the stately historical novels of I.J. Parker. Designed around an 11th-century provincial detective named Sugawara Akitada, these mysteries are saturated with details about the social milieu in which each investigation is set. ISLAND OF EXILES (Penguin, paper, $14) finds Akitada undercover on Sado Island, known for the penal colony that supplies slave labor for the local silver mines. It takes him a dangerously long time to discover who poisoned the colony's highest-ranking prisoner - the emperor's treasonous half-brother - and then framed the governor's son for the crime. But in disguise as a convicted murderer, Akitada is quick to learn the value of a man's life in a place where "a human being is nothing but a candle in the wind." Miyuki Miyabe's new mystery, THE DEVIL'S WHISPER (Kodansha, $24.95), illustrates some modern-day refinements on the punishments doled out to criminals in ancient Japan. When a Tokyo taxi driver is jailed after hitting and killing a woman with his cab, public opinion rapidly turns against his family. The persecution of a 16-year-old nephew living with the family is especially ugly; the boy is already being tormented at school because his father disappeared from his government job after embezzling public money. Miyabe's forte is suspense, and here it's built around the strange behavior of young women being driven to suicide. But the peculiar fascination of the story lies in its acute observations of the way masochistic shame and guilt play into the social conformity so inhibiting to the Japanese identity. Archer Mayor goes out of his way in CHAT (Grand Central, $24.99) to impress us with the ruggedness of native Vermonters. His series hero, Joe Gunther of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation, thinks the mountain topography and long, snowy winters have something to do with nurturing a local character at once "hardy, independent, self-sufficient and sometimes a little cranky." And when his brother and their invalid mother struggle back to health after a suspicious car crash, Joe has new respect for Yankee grit. But even the toughest of his taciturn neighbors has a soft spot when it comes to family, a theme Mayor delicately probes after the murders of two strangers open parental eyes to the dangers awaiting children in Internet chat rooms. It's cases like this that make Vermont winters seem longer and colder. Fair warning to Spenser fans: Robert B. Parker's normally funloving private eye sits on his mitts and turns unusually introspective in his latest adventure, NOW AND THEN (Putnam, $25.95), a condition brought on when he identifies too closely with a client. Not only is Dennis Doherty betrayed by his wife in a way that compromises his job with the F.B.I., but the poor guy is also murdered. And so is his adulterous wife, duped by her treacherous lover. This is all too much for Spenser, who gets drunk and broods about the time his beloved Susan was also lured away by a sinister lover. "Doherty has to matter to someone," he tells her, meaning it's time to settle his own scores. When that's done, maybe he and Susan can have a serious talk about the future. The sleuth in Jason Goodwin's crime novels is a eunuch living in 19th-century Istanbul.
Library Journal Review
Spenser investigates, confirms that Dennis Doherty's wife has been cheating, and suddenly has three corpses on his hands. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.